These Robbing Bees Were Attacking My Beehives

Today I'm going to show you what robbing bees look like, and I'm going to tell you how to avoid it. Now, I've been so stupid in this apiary, and I remember when I put this extension box back on, I was having a little bit of trouble getting it fully aligned. And what I've done is I've not aligned it properly, and I've allowed the bees a gap to get into these boxes upstairs. Now, I've been doing a separate video at the moment showing how I condense my colonies down, and although this looks like a colony with 3 boxes So 3 extension boxes on, or 1 brood box with 2 extension boxes on. There is actually a crown board down limiting it to 6 frames. So these top boxes here are just used frames, empty frames with maybe a little bit of syrup in them. And because I've not put them back together properly, really annoying, the bees are robbing it out. However, it's a very, very good opportunity for me to show you what robbing bees look like. And the second that I walked into this apiary today, I knew something was going a little bit strange. I knew the bees had found something. So you look at all of the entrances across all of the different hives. There was activity at all of the entrances. Wasn't just normal activity, it was frenzied activity, and it was activity without any pollen coming in. So immediately when I'm seeing these things, no pollen coming in, frenzied activity, activity not at the entrances of the hives, and they do this across all of the other hives at the moment. So in this instance here, they found something that they can rob. And bees are so opportunistic that they'll go and they'll rob that identical place there, and then they'll bang around on the other hives and they have a go seeing if they can get in anywhere else as well. So robbing is very, very easy to identify. You'll get frenzied activity in a place where you wouldn't normally expect it. That's the easiest way to identify it, in a place where you've got, say, a crack in your hive. Now that doesn't mean that the bees won't rob through an entrance as well, but it's very, very different to, say, normal activity and orientation flights. You can see the bees here, they're almost hawking in front, and you can see that you've got a significant amount of wasps going in as well. So I find that the robbing behavior tends to align with when the wasps are at their worst, and you can see there, there's a good few wasps getting in here. So really annoyed with myself here. This is a stupid mistake, and it's even more annoying that as I was putting it on, I realized that there was something going wrong, and I've just not taken the time to double-check to make sure that there was no way for the bees to get In there. Now when I open it up, I don't think this is going to be completely full of bees, but there will be a good chunk of bees in there. And luckily on this hive here, it's a very, very easy fix because the actual hive isn't at risk of any damage here, and it isn't at risk of being taken over by the robbing bees. Although robbing in your apiary is something that you need to nip in the bud as soon as possible. It seems to be quite a contagious activity, and obviously it alerts the wasps and then brings the wasps in as well. Definitely not what you want. If you take a look at the downstairs of that hive, that's pretty much normal activity on a day like today. You've got some bees coming in with pollen, you've not got loads and loads of bees flying around, and you've not got any bees hawking in front of the entrance. You can see there you've got one or two just coming in, but they're landing bees. They don't just fly around at the entrance kind of looking for a way to get in. They know how to get in and they get in relatively quickly. Whereas if we compare that to the crack up there, you can see you've got the bees just like flapping around. You've got a lot of them buzzing around at the entrance. They're not making a quick entry because you've got new bees that are being alerted to it and they don't know the way in. And that's the way that I always remember it. If you've got a colony and bees that know their way in, they can get in there quickly. If you've got robbing bees and they're not really sure where the entrance is, they buzz around like this. Right, I think it's about time that I fix this problem. I'm going to go inside, see if there's any bees in there, and we're going to close it up and make sure that there's no further robbing in this apiary. So obviously in this instance it's going to be a really easy fix because all I have to do is put the boxes together the right way around, which I should have done in the first place. If you've got a colony where you maybe have like a little bit of a nick in the wood, or you've got beautiful Swenty boxes where they're ripping down part of the poly and creating their own entrances, All I would do for a short-term fix is get a piece of tape, put a piece of tape over it, and just close the entrance off. Do that all over to stop the robbing, and then you can come back at a later date and switch it over for a decent box or make a longer-term repair. As I said, for me it's going to be really easy. I've just got to put the boxes on together. Let's have a look inside though, see how many bees are actually inside here and see the state of the combs, because it's really obvious and apparent when you have this robbing situation, they really do wreck the combs inside. So immediately you can see all those bees just coming out there, and then you're looking down again, you've not got bees on any combs there, they're flying around. It's quite clearly robbing behavior. So there's a huge amount of bees in here. All I'm going to do is take that top box off, place that over there. I'm going to show you how this colony is actually set up, just so you can see that all of these robbing bees aren't actually doing any damage to the colony. If they were doing damage to the colony, what I would do at this point is I'd probably close the entire colony up. Colonies will go very, very quickly at this point of the year. And already I can see bees going over there to try and rob that colony. Really interesting. And I'll get you a quick closeup of that now. So you can see there, this colony is exactly the same height as the other one, and they're gonna go and try and get into that colony now. And you can see them buzzing around, hawking around. They can't find their way in, so they just buzz around and they will get bored. There's nowhere to get into that one. But you can see how quickly this becomes contagious within an apiary, and they will just wipe out the weakest colony. So back to this one here, you can see huge amount of bees coming in. Let's pull out a couple of those frames now and see if they've taken all of the stores that were in there. Yep, they've cleaned me out. They had some syrup in here, been condensing down the colonies. There was loads of syrup in there, and to be honest, they've done me a little bit of a favour. Okay, it's a bit of a disease risk, not ideal, but they have cleaned them up. Means that those frames will overwinter really nicely now. And again, you can see that frame there had an Apivar strip in there. If you can see the signs of an Apivar strip, nice amount of pollen in there as well, but that did have some stores and they've taken out every last drop. So you can see there, I've got my crown board on, all of those bees downstairs, they're absolutely fine. The robbing bees couldn't get in there, but they will have a go at trying to get in the entrance now. So I'm going to close that entrance down to a single bee space, but luckily the nuc down there is safe and well and they've not been overpowered by those robbing bees. So there we go, let's get a close-up of that. That was the frame that they were going for, and that's the one that's still got some bees left on it, and they're just clearing out every little bit of syrup in there. Luckily these are nice new clean frames and it was just syrup in there, and they've never had brood in them either, so that's a little bit of a bonus. But it's annoying when this happens, and definitely some activity for you to look out for and make sure that it doesn't happen in your apiary. So in terms of putting this back together again, all I'm going to do is just shake off all of those frames, and go and put them on another colony somewhere. I'm not going to put them back on there to give them the same shape so that they can identify it and come back down and rob it, but I'm just going to shake the bees off, go and pop them on another colony, and hopefully this robbing situation will resolve itself within about half an hour to an hour.