The hive is under attack!

As the weather gets colder flowers are harder to find and bees start looking for other sources of food for their winter stores. Unfortunately one source they look for is another beehive. Italian bees (Apis mellifera ligustica) are particularly good at this which means they are particularly hard to keep in the Fall.

Smaller hives frequently are attacked in this way, the workers who are old enough to try and stop the invaders are killed and the workers who are too young hide with the queen while all of their honey is taken away. Once this starts it is very hard to stop. Unfortunately my new observation hive is a small hive and I have some Italian bees in the back yard. One morning I noticed the observation hive was particularly noisy, on closer inspection there were quite a few dead bees in the hive and quite a few bees running from the entrance to the top of the hive and chewing open wax to eat the honey inside.

I acted quickly and closed off the entrance to the hive, trapping the invaders inside. Not long after the air outside the hive was filled with bees carrying pollen on their legs trying to get inside. The pollen marked them as bees who belonged in the hive so I opened it up to let them in and then closed it again. The hive soon was very noisy and it remained that way for the two days I left the hive closed. I left it closed for that long to try and convert the invaders to defenders, to make them think of this hive as their new home.

In the end it worked OK but not perfectly. I did save the hive from being killed but it was my fault this happened in the first place. I had put the equipment I used to extract honey this year in the back yard for the bees to clean up, they do a good job of licking up honey on equipment. Unfortunately it also puts the bees in the robbing mood, since they already found some honey to eat hidden away they learn to start searching for more opportunities. Before this I was a fan of open feeding in the fall but I'm not so sure anymore.