Oops!

[Jeremy Kosciuch]

See, I love bees, and love the opportunity to rob some of these back from my pal Bob. I write a lot on his page as well, this is all my stuff though. I am not sure if anyone could muse like this but me on the subject, so thanks BOB!
Bees are kind enough to let you know ahead of time before they attack, like butting into you at a good clip over and over. This means GO! away, slowly but quickly if you can find a good balance you may not get stung. Now these warnings are usually reserved for passers-by mind you. Sometimes when you are "in the bees" they will warn you, but other times not they just kinda go for you. Alot of factors play into this, one is the breed of bees, seems that when they decoded the honeybee genome they uncovered some interesting facts about bee breeds, and bee breeding. It has long been known that often when you cross say a nice gentle caucasian bee with a nice gentle italian bee, you could end up with lets say the bees from hell. Recall a story mom told me about her dad helping his dad with the bees. Had decent bees she said. Well they got to the hive on the end and evidently they had superseded the queen( or the old one swarmed away) and she got pretty mean with her breedin maybe she liked it rough who knows. Couple hundred stings later grandpa was allergic for the rest of his life. I'll come back to that someday in another thread. Well the original bee brought here(americas) by the settlers was the black bee, the NW europe native honeybee. Then they brought in these italians and when they crossed they got some really mean bees. The genome decoding has given us some hints here. All western honeybee strains came out of africa, and were probably first domesticated by the egyptians. They came into europe in 2 migrations, probably in the hands of man. They proved this by studying three markers present in the african honeybee. The black bee and the caucasian are thought to have came first, they have none of the markers. The Carniolans have 1 or 2 depending on the strain, and Italians have all 3. I am not a great student of history, but I remember some stuff. Egypt and the flight of the Jews, and quite a few years later the Roman empire, hmmmm. They found ancient beehives and lots of em in Israel. Ya know them greeks and Roman peoples took to the sea alot and did a lot o tradin. The Nile flows where hmm... OK after more than just a hint of speculation we have solved a mystery LOL! Cross-breedin different kinds a bees undoes all the generations of culling already done selecting for traits (gentleness primarily I would imagine, as well as adaptation to different climates) over a thousand years or 3. So mix em back and see if them genes combine ( honeybee has the highest sexual recombination level of any known species, don't forget) and revert back to AFRICAN BEES!!!!!! OOPS! here we go again!
On a far more personal level we are all human and tend to make mistakes. I don't care how well you think you got it together you will drop a frame of bees. Or its just a bad day. Worse it starts pourin out of a blue sky on ya when you are taking honey. Boy I love the 3 min old radar animated map. Beekeepers best pal. Maybe you aren't using smoke cause you don't want smoky honey and you just squish a bee( always have the smoker goin, especially if you are brave and don't suit up). Or your hive decides that they are NOT fairies and come to get you, just cause you kicked over the frame leaning up against the hive, or didn't strap a hive together good enough when you moved it. All mistakes I have learned from. Or you drop a hive, thankfully I haven't done that yet. Can't wait to see how pissed they get over a cut out and a stack of frames and big rubber bands OH MY!!!
OOPS!!!
And the worst horror story that doesn't involve your bees dying is this. You get this call for a swarm, and go to collect it but the landowner does not know how long it has been there. Always beware the old swarm! They may have been forced out of necessity to begin building comb without the cavity for it to go in. Any honeybee is going to be hyper defensive under such stress.

[Jeremy Kosciuch]

I would like to touch a little more in depth on bee breeding. bees are known to have the highest sexual recombination rate of any species studied so far. that is a mouthful that means when they get it on the offspring are a thorough mix of their folks. Now when breeding bees, certain traits are selected for by culling the colonies that exhibit less desirable ones. In the olden days this was mainly done to promote gentleness, which is nice to have in your bees. Bees having this awesome combination of genes going on during reproduction means many things. First of all, they are likely to adapt well to local conditions, and geographical as well as weather conditions have isolated certain types over the 3000+ (more like 6000) years bees have been in the hands of man. I mentioned earlier about mixing these isolated strains and the result. The reason being is many of these traits that have been selected for rely on the interaction of many different genes. Kinda like a jigsaw puzzle you are pulling different pieces out of. Well the Black bee of Europe was always capable of defending itself, sheer numbers and venom. Easy to work with the know how and generally gentle. The Italians had come to being under a different det of circumstances in the nearly sub tropic Mediterranean south of the alps, sequestered away from her cousins. Likely the result of trade this bee was more suited to the warmer regions and also gentle. Also the meaner had been culled out by a different process. remember the jigsaw puzzle? ok. fill in this gene here that one there bam!
Now not to say grumpy bees do not have their place, they usually have few mite or hive beetle problems.
There is danger in mixing strains to be sure. I have a Rocky mountain Renia daughter (her mom came from Zia queenbees) and I saw her come in from a mating flight this afternoon. Beautiful sight, but as her genes are likely vastly different from any in the area( this is South Carolina, not New Mexico) I have to watch her closely, in 6 or 8 weeks I may have the hive from hell. Gonna pay close attention to her for sure. Maybe you are asking yourself why bother? Long story but there are very few bees left here, never were many the conditions are good for them for a short time only. We have drought and long dearths, our main flow in the spring is 2 1/2 3 mos long is all but is immense. i figure a desert mountain type bee may adjust well, and her progeny may give me some really good bees. this diverse crazy unpredictable weather we are having made me want to start with a bee that is more used to conditions like this. Dearth, plenty, dearth some, dearth, etc... the mama bee from Zia had a handful size cluster the beginning of march but now she is large enough and wanted to swarm, so now I have this daughter freshly mated and ready to evaluate. Bees rarely inbreed and I have no worries there for sure. Also my largest hive is of great stock and has a good 5 percent or more drone population. these bees disperse to different drone congregation areas with drones from other hives. It is a good bet mine in any given patch will outnumber any other hive 5 to one. Can't wait for the second generation when I introduce some buckfast genetics and others as well. Bee stock (breeding stock) is severely depleted due to the onslaught of the mites. The strong are surviving. I want all good genetic lines here, with the mothers being fancy desert bees or their daughters.
I have mentioned this is in my blood 3 great grandfathers kept a doz hives or so each. One, her fathers father was always doin somethin with his, splittin, checkin em, she said once he got himself some "fancy bees" and they left the hive soon as he dumped em in and built a nest in an old owl nest 40 ft off the ground a mile away. Guess maybe he released the queen straight i dunno. He followed em and got em back. Took him a week to build a scaffold and cut em out, but he got his bees back. 12$ was losta money for bugs in the 50's. Guess old Frank is right I am a "bee natural".Mom says I fret over my bees like her grandpa did. Funny thing I reckon. Good thing too...
Buckfast bees were developed by Brother Adam over his whole life almost. He used bees from every race even african, and carefully selected for traits. A good all around bee, but prone to making a huge hive not a good plan when the world dries up. Very resistant though, and the strong will survive if i mix em up. I have a lot of places to put outyards and a central location. Next couple years I should be seeing some good results. The evaluation yard in the middle of the swamp by the Edisto river is a good idea, and I will be using it. Don't need an OOPS!

[Jeremy Kosciuch]

Really just an addendum to my earlier oops thread, but it sounded good, so I went with it. Everybody knows there is an element of danger when messing with something that could kill you. That is what makes it dangerous and that is why so many people do so many stupid things for the thrill. Well, bees are not like that for me, I am sure they are for some folks, the adrenaline rush of the excitement oh my! If I was in this for excitement I would move to Florida and catch Africanized bees, cut em out of houses, stuff like that, rescue little doggies and "rehabilitate bees" ie re queening and killing off the grumpy strain right there as soon as you see the mean bitch.Well, really I would love it, but my wife doesn't want to go, so I will stay here with her, and wait on them. They aren't that far really.
Now, sure, sticking your hands into a living organism (supercreature) consisting of thousands of things that can inject you with poison does have a certain element of danger. Knowledge is the key here, you really do have to know what you are doing. Still, things go wrong and you get stung up. Common threshold for surviving a "bee attack" with no meds is between 200 and 1200 stings they think. Some people can go into anaphylactic shock over one in a minute or less, so who really knows. Good news is you either become immune or eventually go into anaphylaxis, but anyway... So knowledge is key right? Well, unfortunately with honey bees the best way to learn is probably from your own mistakes. Sure, you can read a lot and ask a lot of questions but all that matters not a bit when you just dropped a frame of bees on a hot dry day. Nothing can make you remember that lesson like doing it. You tend to forget all that book learning and react, then you find out that if dropping them was bad, your reaction was worse. Worse yet, you have your "divide" all done and everything is good for 2 weeks, when one sunny afternoon you decide to take a look at it and see more bees coming and going from that hive than you know could possibly exist in there. The robbers of summer are here! What do you do? oh the books tell you throw a wet sheet over it and the bees will sort it out. Yep, last fall, I had me a little robbing frenzy and did this. Well don't you know that night it frosted in sept? HERE? Killed every forager I had out of the hive at 2:00 pm that day, they were stuck to the sheet when I got home that night at 200 am. Well there went my hive, they were so large at one point they almost starved, bunch of bees with nothing coming in eat bunches of honey faster than I thought for sure. So they were in poor shape at the onset of this robbing incident anyway. The first robbing incident was much more exciting, me out there looking for a queen I have 40 bucks in incl shipping in surrounded by this swirling mass of bees, watching them go through the comb like buzz saws. Robbers pretty much destroy everything fast, like before your eyes fast. They say use smoke, well... mine must not have been strong enough cause it didn't seem to faze em. Face it honeybees rob each other if there is nothing else to do.
Why?
They are bugs, I know I keep coming back to this, but they have no respect. It is a tough world, and if this hive is strong enough to demolish this one and bring home the bacon when there is no pork to be found, well.... Hate to sound all Darwinian about it. Life is hard out there, its life or death.
Bees will be bees. Try to understand them if you got em, instead of using them. Try to learn from other folk's mistakes. I personally had not moved my split very far, and most of the bees I put in there went home. I think they came back later too. My new queen and her handful of loyal bees just couldn't compete. The big hive? Well, maybe I split my bees too thin, but it was huge and had started from a little thing, I was making light splits last year, gotta spread the bees. Then there was just lots of bees at the wrong time, and they did not have enough to weather the dearth like my smaller hives with much less food did. Maybe I had the wrong bees, well, don't have em now.
Think now I might have the right ones, other than birds eating my queen on a mating flight (I guess that's what happened to her, maybe it was that fat lizard I been watching) my bees are doing just fine. If i have to feed em in aug, I guess I have to, but I made sure to leave them plenty while they wait for the goldenrod. Lucky girls get to eat sparkleberry honey all summer long...