Calm down, calm down! Or, please don’t be stroppy with me…

At last the warmer weather is with us, plants and flowers are flourishing, and the beekeeping season has well and truly started. All of our bee colonies came through the Spring successfully and have grown exponentially in the past few weeks due to the abundance of forage, higher temperatures and relative lack of predators compared to previous years. (To be honest, the Asian hornets don’t usually become a problem until later in the summer but for now we are enjoying their absence around our hives). There are more insects appearing in our gardens, which we see as a positive, but we are often told by people that they don’t like bees as they are frightened of being stung.

So, is it true that bees are aggressive and are just looking for an opportunity to sting us? While many beekeepers, us included, will argue that honey bees aren’t aggressive, they’re just defensive, there are times when bees will display aggression. Our regular hive observations tell us lots about our bees, and we enjoy the challenge of assessing why our bees act in particular ways. Granted, aggression is thankfully quite rare but there are two main factors that can cause a colony to act in this way. These are environmental circumstances and genetics.

It’s almost a given that at some point during your beekeeping life you will have to manage some form of aggression from your bees if you are a more hands-on beekeeper. It’s no fun to have to deal with such a situation (stroppy bees do mess with the ‘zen’ nature of being at a hive!) but there are ways of coping with it and getting them to calm down.

In the first instance, the environment, the ‘aggy’ behaviour can be due to the presence of predators (usually Asian hornets, although wasps and other bees robbing honey are included in the list), as well as the noise and vibrations from garden machinery. As a novice beekeeper, many years ago, I made the mistake of mowing the grass in front of our hives….the bees mobbed the electric mower and I had to abandon it until the evening! Weather conditions play a huge part in the temperament of the bees which is why we steer clear of our hives when it’s humid, windy, and/or stormy. Having a hive in an unsuitable location e.g. an exposed area, will make them irritable, and interference from a clumsy or rushed beekeeper will simply annoy them. Colonies that are queenless will also feel unsafe and ‘lost’ and will react accordingly.

The second cause of unrest is genetics and is more difficult to identify and to plan for. Further research is required but it is believed that the drones, the males in a colony, possess the ‘aggressive’ gene which is passed on to future bees via the mated queens. A calm queen bee and several less-calm drones will create semi-calm bees, but with each generation the ‘calm’ element will become diluted. As all the bees in a colony come from one queen, it’s easy to see how a colony will become progressively more ‘aggressive’ with each new queen.

It can be difficult to work out exactly what’s causing your bees to be a bit ‘touchy’ so the first things to try to deal with are the environmental factors. Practise being more careful when carrying out hive inspections (if and when you conduct them) – be patient, unhurried and decisive. Ensure you only approach the hives when the weather is decent – not too hot, a storm isn’t brewing, and it’s not too windy or raining. Consider relocating the hive if it’s not protected from the elements….and think about gardening around it.

If none of the above change the behaviour of the bees then it is probably caused by the queen. If there is no queen then the bees will be cranky, and if successive generations of bees are making your beekeeping life unenjoyable, then the same solution is required. This is to re-queen with a queen bee of your choosing. Don’t allow a queenless colony to raise their own queen from eggs in the hive as the new queen will have the same genetic make-up as the previous problem queen. It’s often easiest to buy a mated queen from a trusted source or take an egg from a ‘calm’ colony that the queenless bees can raise. Re-booting a colony can work wonders for the temperament of the bees and you can enjoy beekeeping again.