This may surprise
some readers who blithely assume one honey bee is much like another,
but most bee-keepers will know better. Bees may not have individual
personalities, but each hive certainly has it's own characteristics.
Good bees are calm.
They're the sort you see in those photos of people sporting a
bee-beard or handling bees in a T-shirt and shorts. It's the result
of good breeding.
Most bees aren't
like that. My Berkshire mongrels are relatively well behaved, but not
mellow enough for me to forego a veil and gloves. Their bad behaviour
manifests itself in several different ways:
There are the
'Meeters and Greeters' – those troublemakers who save you the
bother of visiting the hives by flying up the garden path to meet
you. It's best to be fully kitted-up before going out if you have
these bad girls in your apiary.
Next the 'Followers'
– they just follow you like a black cloud as you move from hive to
hive and back again to the house. It's annoying, but they're not usually much trouble.
More spectacular are
the 'Pingers' – these bees fly with such ferocity at you're face
that you can hear them pinging off the veil. They make bee-keeping
stressful but you don't suffer much harm ... provided your veil is
intact!
Then there are the
'Burrowers' – they're sly and will be quietly investigating every
fold, seam and hole in your clothing to find a way to get inside and
sting you. Burrowers will crawl up your trousers, through the cuffs
of your sleeves, in between the tiny gap in the zip of your veil.
They're the one's you find on the inside your bee suit, next to your
face. Fortunately by the time most burrowers have reached their
destination they have often forgotten why they're attacking you and
are more concerned about making their own escape.
But the worst of all
the bad bees are the 'Cling-ons'. They just hang onto you and wait
for a chance to get even ….
I have a hive of
Cling-ons at the moment. They were a swarm of bees I reluctantly
collected in Eton last June. Nobody else wanted them so I cobbled
together some kit to give them a home. This proved to be a thankless
task because within weeks it was clear that these Eton girls were not
as well behaved as our Eton boys - they lack breeding.
This was confirmed
when I spotted the queen – she was unmarked and had led a primary
swarm, which suggests that she had either come from a feral colony,
or more likely an apiary where the bee-keeper had been too scared to
manage such aggressive bees properly. Instead they were allowed to
swarm, and probably swarmed again and again. Worse still the area was
contaminated with drones spreading bad tempered genes into
neighbouring apiaries.
My Cling-ons are
manageable at the moment even though they hang on to my bee suit in
out-of-sight and difficult-to-reach places which makes getting
changed afterwards hazardous. But come the summer when there are
50,000 bees in the hive the thought of a hundred or more Cling-ons
all over my veil and suit is no laughing matter. So they'll have to
go.
Trekkies can relax -
I wont be needing the services of the Star Ship 'Enterprise' to deal with these
Cling-ons. Come the spring I'll kill the queen and unite the
remaining bees and brood with a better behaved colony.
Not that good
manners are learnt – they'll continue to be bad bees until the day
they die, but at least I'll get some useful work from them in the
meantime.
