Aggression
A new queen usually brings peace
Most colonies regard their beekeeper with equanimity. They may fly around you when you open their hive, not because they are aggressive but because they have been disturbed. But an occasional colony makes life uncomfortable.
Things that upset bees
Let’s do a thought experiment. You are playing with your baby when a huge giant stinking of hydrogen sulphide (rotten eggs) dressed in black silently creeps in and kills your baby. You are tucked up in bed when the roof and ceiling are removed, and bright light floods in. There is an earthquake; you arrive home and find someone on your roof throwing the tiles on the ground, and someone else is stealing the food from your fridge.
These are pretty freaky for us, and it should be no surprise when bees react to similar threats. Dark objects, moving objects, vibrations and carbon dioxide are suspect. Threats that resemble a bear wearing aftershave, walking backwards and forwards in front of the hive, pushing a lawn mower over a pile of bees whilst eating honey.
Persistent causes of aggression
Genetics.
Queenless
Poor inspection technique — prevent squashed bees
Frequent disturbance
Predation
Temporary — short-lived causes
Robbing.
A dearth, particularly after a nectar flow
Harvesting honey
Vibrating tools
Electric storms
Fragrances?
Like humans, some bees are upset more quickly than others. Environmental factors like a dearth make everyone grumpy. Since we often knock them around every week (very gently), it is not surprising they may show their protest: run on the comb, fly up and chase you away. So their evil behaviour may be due to you. This can become an established pattern.
Stingers in a glove.
Their response can be ramped up to a state where attack becomes their best method of defence. Aggressive bees take you out before you get close to their hive, while defensive bees go for you after you’ve opened their hive. It is an important distinction.
Defence at the hive entrance is orchestrated by alarm pheromones (scent messages). To recruit soldiers, the guards fan pheromones in to the hive. Smoke knocks out a bee’s capacity to detect these scents. This is why it is advisable to smoke the entrance before doing an inspection. Bees can release a cocktail of chemicals (40) from a gland that is part of the stinger apparatus. Fifteen of them stimulate one or more alarm behaviours such as flying from the nest to locate the source of the disturbance, pursuing, biting, and stinging. They prepare the bees to fight, reducing their response to food and making them less likely to withdraw in the face of attack.
Aggression between bees
Other than when queens fight each other, aggression is usually concerned with barring foreigners from entering their home.
Admittance is free during nectar flows. At other times, if a stray forager lands, stays calm, hunkers down, sticks out her tongue, and bribes the guards with some nectar, she will be allowed in (but may subsequently be accosted on the comb).
Queenless colonies are initially more aggressive but, after a while, become calmer (presumably when they get laying workers).
A bee’s primary weapon - its stinger
After a worker bee emerges, her stinger takes a few days to mature. After this, she can sting threats like other insects without her barbed stinger, causing an impediment. But her stinger gets stuck when she gives a deeper sting to something like a glove. She dances around until her bottom rips off, like a slowworm that loses its tail when threatened. However, a stinger does not wiggle around. It looks like a cotton thread. The bee is fatally wounded. The stinger pumps out alarm pheromones, which recruit other bees to attack. Despite the severity of their wound, a few bees can live up to 5 days after they’ve lost their stinger.
Smoke knocks out a bee's appreciation of these signals. So, if you are stung, push the stinger out and puff smoke over the area. Remove the stinger quickly. Speed, not technique, is vital. Quick action will reduce the dose of venom.
A Slowworm sunbathing, asking to be trodden on and to lose the tip of its tail.
Patterns of Defence
Guards
Stingers
followers
rangers
rockets
Intimidators
Guards
These hang around the entrance and may be on duty for an hour or a day. Some wander around challenging other bees, while others stay in the same position for a while and occasionally rear up on their hind legs in a menacing gesture like a crab. Look carefully to see crabbing; it lasts a split second and only occurs when there are more than several bees on the landing board.
Stingers
If a hive is attacked, guard bees that linger at the entrance orchestrate entrance defence. Soldier bees are recruited if the guards cannot cope. There are plenty of them; up to 40% of bees in the colony are soldiers. Older bees are more prone to be unpleasant than house bees, so aim to disturb a touchy colony when lots of them are out foraging.
Followers
When you get close to a sensitive colony, you constitute a threat that needs chasing away. They do so by sending 1–4 bees (or more, depending on the colony’s temperament) that fly whilst doing pirouettes and making intimidating buzzy noises. If the threat moves away, it may get stung; if it does not, it must be stung.
My experience is like this: After performing my inspections, I sit 4 metres from my hives and wait for followers to go away so I can remove my bee suit. When I kill two out of three followers, there is a short interlude, after which I am harried by three again. I am forced to retreat. If their behaviour persists, I cull the colony, to ensure passer bys are not stung.
Rangers
In addition to local defence, a sensitive colony uses a mobile force to intercept incoming threats. If a ranger bee detects you, she harries you with the buzz off sting pattern. Some unpleasant colonies instruct their rangers to patrol many meters away, perhaps 20 meters from the hive; others less than four meters.
Rockets
Rarely, a bee is trigger-happy. She flies straight at you, may get stuck in your hair or go in your ear, and stings, no question asked. It is unusual, and occurs after a colony is disturbed, and will launch itself at someone about 6 meters from your hives (I’ve only experienced it twice).
Intimidators
Bees lining up in the cracks with their faces towards you suggests they are alarmed. They are intimidating rather than overtly aggressive, but everyone smokes them down.
Coping with Aggression
Do inspections when your neighbours are out.
Inspect the obnoxious hive last. Use plenty of smoke, wear thick gloves, and use masking tape to obscure potential openings, such as where your gauntlets join your suit and gloves. I’ve heard that too much smoke can aggravate bees, but I’ve never noticed.
Avoid shaking tetchy bees off the frames. If necessary, shake them inside the box. Thumping unhappy bees off a frame held over the hive makes them go ballistic.
Swatting: When you have friendly bees, killing them is abhorrent, but if they turn nasty, it does not feel so bad. If a malicious bee comes close to you, and you are wearing gloves, kill it by clapping your hands.
If they catch you unawares, run away with your bee suit around your ankles whilst flailing your arms.
As an emergency measure to protect work-persons, close the hive entrance when the bees are at home. This is relatively safe with a poly hive, but do it at your own risk. If you have wooden hives, be extra cautious. A lock in, is a bad idea; they must pooh, and they may overheat and die. So, if the threat is temporary, close the entrance and replace the roof with a travel screen or varroa mesh taped to the top of the hive. Spray the screen with water a couple of times in hot weather. After the disturbance is over or in the evening, open the entrances. After their incarceration, they bubble out; if they do not fan, that is a good sign.
Move nasty colonies to a safe space.
Buy your workmen bee-suits.
Go into a dark place, and you will effectively wear an invisibility cloak.
Call for help: really offensive bees will plaster your bee suit and fly around looking for someone to attack. Don’t leave a nasty colony and do nothing. If you feel overwhelmed, call for help. That is what Bee Associations are for.
Beekeepers with nice mongrels seem to have amiable bees, even when their Q mates with all and sundry. This may be because these beekers know how to handle their bees and breed their own Q. An occasional Q has to be culled. But even calm bees sting if you pinch them. Occasionally, an unruly colony one year can become perfect the next despite your inaction. Perhaps they supersede.
Learn about pheromones — Neurobiology of Chemical Communication.
Fixing aggressive bees
Having eliminated all the environmental factors, the cause of aggression is genetic, and the queen must die. Meanwhile, if you’re not in your bee suit and a disagreeable bee buzzes you, swat it with a tennis or squash racket.
If a colony is unpleasant (with a propensity to sting more than normal and follow you after an inspection), but they are okay if not disturbed; they are easily frightened. Do not destroy them, only kill their drone brood. Leave them alone for a while and there is a small chance they will settle down. However, don’t let them swarm (and propagate their bad genes)! Do something, don’t leave them any time at all!
How to manage aggressive bees: kill or re-queen
Kill
Bees from a colony that maliciously buzz and stings two metres away from their hive, despite not having been disturbed, may be acceptable as long as the public are not put at risk. This can’t be so unusual with Africanised bees. However, most people would prefer not to live with unkind bees. If necessary, move the colony somewhere safe. Re-queen or destroy.
To euthanise a colony, brush the bees into a bowl of soapy water or spray the mixture on to the combs. A brief squirt of washing-up liquid is sufficient. The advantage of brushing is that the combs can be reused.
If the bees are seriously vile, use petrol or sulphur tablets. Fumigation with Isopropyl alcohol, or acetic acid should work, although I’ve not tried them. Petrol is the standard treatment; 500ml is poured in to the hive. Obviously, it makes everything stink for an eternity. Surely 500ml is excessive.
Re-queen
This usually improves their behaviour within 48 hours, definitely after several weeks. Removing the resident Q may be painful, but to find her try one of these techniques. Once you have removed the old queen, introduce the new Q immediately if using a proper Butler cage or a protected queen cell. Otherwise, use some other method. Nasty bees may respond poorly to a new queen, so don’t use a precious one. If the nasty colony isn’t too bad, another option is to kill the queen and unite it with another colony.
A bowl of dead bees in soapy water. This is the result of a moderate-sized colony. A large colony will require two bowls.
If you like, place a nuc at the home position to mop up the lost bees and dispatch them the next day. They will be too homesick to trouble you.
How to fix aggression in a perfect world
Beekers who always have perfect bees know what they are doing. The rest of us can learn from Africanised bees (AB), termed “killer bees”, as they are far more defensive than European bees. This is a misnomer, as the risk of death from an AB sting (0.23 per million stings) is 12 times less than that due to a scorpion sting (in Mexico).
Despite their aggressive reputation, there is hope for Africanised bees. The accidental release of these bees in Brazil led to their spread to North America. However, selective breeding can significantly improve their behaviour within 4–5 generations. This is a promising prospect for hobby beekeepers with a few colonies, although it may require collaboration among beekeepers to select queens with favourable traits.
Aggressive traits in bees are genetically dominant and paternal. However, there is a potential solution. If all beekeepers were diligent in culling drone brood from unruly colonies and selectively flooded the area around their apiaries with placid drones, a significant change could be seen. By frequently replacing queens, all bees could exhibit improved behaviour in a few years. This could lead to a decrease in the demand for queen breeders. Mind you, life is always complex; there are feral bees and poorly motivated beekeepers.
Next: what happens when a colony does’t have a queen.
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