Hive defender back11/10/2022 My neighbor mentioned that he has never seen them act like this in all of his years of beekeeping. The company he has mow his yard had to do it with one hand on the mower and the other hand flailing in the air trying to keep the bees off of them. All I was trying to do was water my front yard. For the past two days I have been aggressively attacked by his bees which are on the very back corner of his property farthest from me. The neighbor was attempting to prepare for harvesting the honey and something obviously set them off. Our new neighbors are also beekeepers and are the ones who got the previous owners of our home into beekeeping. We finally had to spray the leftover bees as we were told they would die regardless without their queen and hive. We were aggressively attacked by the bees while trying to move into our house. From what I was told, they moved them off to the country. The previous owners were beekeepers and had moved the hive about 3 days prior to us moving in. My wife and I moved into a house about a month ago. I have to agree with you, Tamara, and disagree with Jim. More often than not bad behavior is merely a part of the cyclic nature of honey bee colonies. If the queen was superseded by a queen with more aggressive or Africanized genes, that could be the source of the problem. Of course, other factors can produce an aggressive colony. During the “dog days of summer,” no amount of fanning helps evaporate the nectar or cool the hive. Rainy weather, especially when it comes with heat and high humidity, makes bees cranky as well.Regular visits by any creature-including a beekeeper-may make honey bees more antagonistic. Raccoons, opossums, or skunks may attack colonies, especially as the days become cooler. Honey bees and wasps are not the only creatures preparing for winter.This means more fighting and more alarm pheromone. Before long, wasps and yellowjackets arrive on the scene to collect both meat and sweets. After robbing, other predators may flock to the odor of dead bees and the scent of open honey.Once the alarm pheromone has aroused the bees, you and your pets and your neighbors are fair game as well.The alarm pheromone makes other honey bees combative, and more fighting means more pheromone is released which means more bees join the fray. The fighting bees release an alarm pheromone-an odor that warns other bees of the danger.Dead honey bees may litter the ground in front of the hive. If robbing is going on, you will see bees fighting with each other at the hive entrance. This often results in a cloud of bees around a hive, especially in the fall. Not only are robbing honey bees threatening, but the bees being robbed become combative defenders of their stores.This begins an assertive behavior known as robbing. The bees can’t find nectar so they often try to steal it from other colonies.
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