Prevent Wasp Attacks On Beehives - How To Stop Wasps Robbing Your Bees And Protect Weak Colonies
In this episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey explains how to prevent and respond to wasp robbing of honey bee colonies. He outlines why wasps become a severe problem in late summer, emphasizing that their seasonal shift to seeking sugary foods can devastate weak or late‑season nucs within 24‑48 hours. Edwards stresses the importance of maintaining strong, full colonies and timing nuc production to avoid vulnerability. He details practical entrance modifications—under‑floor entrances, reducers, and appropriately sized nuc entrances—as the most effective barrier against wasps. Feeding practices are covered, warning that spilled syrup attracts wasps and recommending night‑time feeding and immediate cleanup. Optional control measures such as wasp traps and nest removal are discussed for heavily infested apiaries. For active attacks, Edwards advises blocking entrances, using wet towels, reducing or removing the entrance, and, most importantly, relocating the hive to a new apiary to break the wasps’ trail. He concludes with a balanced view of wasps as pollinators, noting that with proper preventive measures they are not a major threat, and encourages beekeepers to implement these strategies early in the season.
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Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're going to talk to you about how to prevent robbing from wasps. So if you're not aware, I've now set up my own Patreon page, so take a look over on Patreon and see if that's something you're interested in. One of the things you can do on the Patreon page though is request specific videos, and this is the first of those videos that has been requested. So someone's come along and said, do a video saying how do you stop colonies getting attacked by wasps? So here's the video. So wasps are an incredible pain at this time of year. Their colonies are huge, but they really, really do build up to a very, very big size at this time of year. Earlier in the year, they're not looking for sugary substances, they're looking for protein. And then they have a switchover in their nest, which means they want to get into the hives and go for sugary substances. So you, you might know it's kind of like wasps aren't a problem all the way through the year, and then pretty much overnight they become a really, really bad problem. Wasp attacks will strip a nuc clean in 24 hours, and they can take a colony down in literally a few days. It's so frustrating when you go and you You go to look at a nuc or you go to look at a colony and they're gone. It just appears that they're completely gone, and what's happened there is that the wasp attacks become so bad that they generally abscond, or the wasps do sometimes kill some of the bees as well. Just that it's just kind of like massive warfare. You see the state of some of these colonies after the wasps have been in, all the comb's torn down, and then what happens is the wasps go away and then the bees come back and rob the colony out as well. So once you've seen a colony being attacked by wasps, if left unsupervised or you don't do any mitigation, there's nothing left. There's no brood, there's no bees. They strip down the wax and it's just a mess and you have to start again. So obviously you want to do as much as you possibly can to minimize that, and that's what I'm going to show you in this video. A few really simple tips and tricks that I'm sure a lot of you are doing anyway on how to minimize the chances of your bees being robbed by wasps, and then we're going to talk a little bit about what to do if you're in an active robbing situation, because then it's a little bit of panic stations and you need to do something slightly different. So first things to do when dealing with wasps is you need to understand that timeline. So a lot of people make up 2-frame nucs early in the season. I certainly do that. So kind of May and June, you've got no problem whatsoever. However, making up a 2-frame nuc, building it up, feeding it syrup, adding brood, getting that into a strong state so you can overwinter that nuc or turn it into a full-size colony. Now, if you were to do that later on in the year, you're really going to struggle with wasps. You need to get the timing of that correct, and that's the reason is, is the first thing you need to do to make sure that your colonies can survive against wasp attacks is they need to be strong. They need to be The boxes at this time of year, so kind of August, September, they just need to be full. And if the boxes are full of bees, they can put all of the guard bees outside the front of the hive and they can help you guard against wasp attacks. So that's my first tip, is just make sure the colonies are really strong. Plan for it each year. Don't make up really, really late nucs that are going to be weak because they're going to be susceptible to wasp attacks. So the second thing, and my second tip for you is adapt your floors and entrances as best as you possibly can to mitigate wasp attacks. So you'll see a lot of people this time of year, if you're on a standard national floor, they put in excluders— so kind of, sorry, an entrance reducer to minimize the amount of space that the bees have to guard against. So that would be my least favorite of the ways to minimize wasp attacks, but if you're on that floor, that's definitely the best best way to do it. What I would suggest though is take a look at our underfloor entrance video. The underfloor entrance is exceptional at stopping wasp attacks. For some reason they just can't quite understand that you need to go in and then up to get into where the honey is stored. They go in and come back out, and then because you're using an 8mm strip entrance as well, so a single bee space, it's very, very difficult for them to get through that first row of guard bees. So I've found since I've moved over to my underfloor entrances, I have not lost one single colony due to wasp attacks in a full-size hive. Now nucs are a different matter. I've lost a couple of nucs this season to wasp attacks, and that was going back to what I said before. It was that the, um, the colony wasn't quite strong enough, so the wasps have managed to get in and overrun Rule all of the bees. And then also, I've probably not got the entrances down to the right size. A nuc entrance is about the size of a 50 pence piece, and that's actually a bit big for a colony like that. So what I like to do on my nucs is I spin the wheel round a little bit, and then I put a drawing pin in to stop it moving, and I'll adjust that gap down to kind of 1, 1.5 bee spaces. That really does help against the struggle against wasps. Because it just limits the amount of flow in and out of the colony, and they can put the guard bees there and stop those wasps getting into the colony. So the next tip that I've got is feeding. You need to be really, really careful when you feed your colonies. Bees can't smell sugar syrup, but wasps can, and that was a fact that I only found out recently, and it explains quite a lot, to be honest. So if a wasp's flying around and you've put a couple of drops of sugar syrup there, the wasps will smell it and hone in on that colony. And then as soon as they know that there's syrup there, they're all over it. They're trying to bore into the poly, they're trying to get into any little possible crack that they can. And you would have probably seen this in your own hives— they're persistent. As soon as they smell it, they're there, and they just, they just want to get in and get at that syrup. Whereas a bee, do you know what I mean, it'll just kind of come across some syrup, taste it, and be like, oh, that's nice, and I'm going to go and tell my mates, and I'll tell them where it is, as opposed to them going and smelling it and bringing it there. So that's an interesting one. So when you're feeding, you just need to be really, really careful. Don't spill any syrup, like none, not a single drop, or the wasps will hone in on it and attack your hive. If you do, um, if you do need to feed them, do it last thing at night when the bees aren't flying, when the wasps aren't flying. That way, if you do spill any syrup You can clean it up straight away. Loads and loads of fresh water, really kind of water it down, and then hopefully overnight the condensation will wash the remains of that away as well. So just be really careful when you're feeding, don't spill your syrup. Now this one, I'm not a massive fan of this to be honest, and I don't do this, but I'm not dead against people doing it, and that's wasp traps. Now if you're in a— if you're in an area where it is notoriously bad for wasps, I don't think it's the end of the world putting up wasp traps in your apiary. Something effective, you have to work on a bait that's good for you, and then that will reduce the number of wasps that are just kind of generally around because you're going to be trapping them. You can also go around and if you identify any wasp nests, you can take them down and destroy them. Again, it's not something that I do, but I understand if you're in an area and there's kind of 3 or 4 huge wasp nests, you've got your hives there, it's a quick fix just to kind of destroy those wasp nests, and then they're not kind of causing a nuisance to your colony. So those 4 tips, that's pretty much it. I mean, that is all I do to prevent wasp attack. Um, it is— there's no rocket science there. It's quite simple things. The big one for me is the entrance. The underfloor entrance has saved so many of my colonies from wasp attacks, and I just don't have an issue with it anymore in those colonies. Keeping the colonies strong though is the number one. If your colonies aren't strong, the wasps will work their way in eventually and they'll just take over and just destroy the colony, eat all the colony, eat the brood, eat whatever they want, and then the colony just gets robbed out by bees. So they're my main 2 tips really: big strong colonies, make sure you get the entrances right. Underfloor entrances are definitely my favourite. So that's kind of like proactive mitigation to stop potential wasp attacks. Now, if you're in a position where you've got a really, really bad active wasp attack and you want to know what to do, here is my advice for you. So what you want to do as a first thing is you want to block off the entrances. You need to make sure that anything coming into that hive can't get in. And that sounds really bad because you might be stopping the flow of bees. What you need to do then is move it, move the colony. Like, it sounds crazy because your bees aren't going to know where that colony's gone to, and you're probably going to lose some bees. But if you've got a strong colony, they can probably adapt to that, and they can probably take on the loss of 10% of their worker bees, um, because they can reproduce them. If you leave it in the same place, it's so difficult to stop wasp attacks. They just keep coming back. And even by changing the entrance is over. They're really persistent. So, I mean, proactive one, if you see it, what I would do, really soaking wet towel, cover the colony, reduce the entrance down to nothing. If you've got an underfloor entrance, great, stick the underfloor entrance on. That will bamboozle the bees. You can do this thing called a tunnel entrance as well. So if you Google tunnel entrances, that's really, really good as a kind of proactive measure as well. So there's other floors that you can use to stop the wasps getting in. But the big tip really is just move the colony. As soon as you move that colony, the wasps just don't know where it is. You can move it 10, 15, 20 feet, or however far you want, preferably to another apiary, and then you just start again. As soon as you've got that colony to another apiary, then you can just put in place all of those mitigation measures. So obviously you can't really boost the strength of the colony overnight. But you can reduce that entrance down to as small as it possibly is. You can put in place a tunnel entrance or an underfloor entrance. You can make sure there's no syrup, there's nothing kind of that's going to attract any of those wasps, and then you can monitor the colony as well. And that's pretty much all I would ever do, and that will save the colony. And I mean, once you get to the new spot, and like I said, a new apiary is preferable because the wasps will remain in the colony as you move them, and then as you let them out, they're potentially going to know where that colony is again. Close the colony up, take it to a completely new apiary, and just start again. And that is the best advice I can give you for stopping an active wasp attack. And you will, you'll lose some bees doing that, and if you've got other beehives in your apiary, those bees will just work out where they are and they will just fly into the other beehives. So, I mean, in my apiaries, you see it, we've got loads of colonies. If they're attacking one of them that's particularly weak, I'll just close it up, nice wet towel on it if it's a hot day, move it to a different apiary, and then all of the bees that don't know where their home is will be flying around. They'll just go into other colonies. The wasps will try and go into other colonies as well, and if those other colonies are strong, then there shouldn't need to be put up any additional defenses. What I would say though is make sure that your other colonies in that apiary have got the correct preventative measures in place before you do that manipulation. So make sure they've got a tunnel entrance, make sure they've got either an underfloor entrance or you put the reducer down to nothing, make sure there's no syrup around, make sure there's no active wasp's nest in the areas. I mean, tick off everything you possibly can and then go and deal with that wasp's nest, but make sure you do it immediately, like It needs to be done within the first couple of hours. It's so quick to decimate a colony of wasps, and it's really, really horrible to see. So that's it. I've covered pretty much everything that I know about wasps and wasp attacks. I don't want to give wasps a really, really bad name. Wasps are kind of an important pollinator species, and I don't want to go around just kind of exterminating all wasp nests just to protect my bees. I think they can live in harmony with one another. I mean, it's not like an Asian hornet where they're going to come and absolutely destroy all of your colonies, which I know isn't exactly right. You can put in place the mitigation measures, but with the correct mitigation measures, wasps really aren't a massive issue, to be honest. It's the nucs that they tend to go for and the colonies that don't have the correct protective measures in place. So I hope you found that useful. Get your protective measures in place early the season to stop the wasp attacks happening in the first place. And then if they don't happen and you still get a colony that's attacked by wasps, be really, really quick to put in place those measures, get it to a different apiary, and start again pretty much with that colony. If they need an additional frame of brood or something added to boost the numbers, you can do that. But generally, if you get them out quick enough, they'll produce those bees on their own. So as always, thanks for watching. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the So you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Peace.
