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Faunsdale, AL | Being in Texas, most likely the colony was Africanized bees. We don’t have them here......yet.
Queenless colony of normal honey bees is much more defensive, maybe even on the aggressive side of things than a queen right colony.
I had combined two hives because I thought one was queenless and I didn’t want to loose everything. So I put down a sheet of newspaper on the top super of a neighboring hive I thought was good and strong and stacked the brood boxes of the “queenless” hive on it.
Fast forward a couple months and I decided to go through the tall stack of boxes and sort things out and take stock.
Well, second box on the top I started hitting brood! My queenless bees must have not been so queenless! Or at least they didn’t stay queenless.
As I worked down through the two brood boxes and then the honey supers of the “strong” hive, the bees were pretty even tempered, a little smoke and they were fine.
Then I got to the queen excluder on top of the brood boxes of the “strong” hive. When I lifted it, the bees beneath it came out with a roar! I hadn’t even pulled any frames or moved anything and had been keeping the entrance smoked every now and then, but they came out like I had opened the proverbial “can of whup ass”.
Sure enough there was no queen in the bottom. They were just beneath the queen right colony I had combined with them, but they didn’t act like they knew it.
Any more, I get suspicious if a colony is extra defensive.
Edited by ccjersey 4/28/2021 12:46
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Agressive Bees
