Cannibalism in the Bee Yard

Today the bee-eaters were out in force.  At this time of year I often see the European hornet in the beeyard, looking for bees to feed their young.  One such hornet has camped out on the post to the stair railing of my deck, keeping her eyes on the comings and goings of the bees in my nearby hives.  While she is large and fierce looking, she is not so much a danger to me as she is to the bees.  She grabs bees and whisks them off to feed her babies.

Although I caught her on this shrub, most of her time she spends on my deck stair post.

 

From this vantage point, she has a great view of the bees as they come and go.  She didn't like my presence and although she didn't sting me, she dive bombed my hair as she did the day before.  It worked.  I moved.   

Although I didn't get a shot of it, I saw a bald-faced hornet struggling with a bee.  The hornet finally won the battle and carried the still-fighting bee off to feed its family.

I think I've gotten a photo of the bald-faced hornet in its cannabalistic glory every year so I'll have to watch over the next few days for another opportunity to capture its image.

Beeyard Mayhem

At 8 PM on Saturday night I was moving a wheelbarrow through my backyard to the shed when I realized there were bees buzzing and swirling all around my yard and rising from my deck. I put on my bee jacket and veil and went out to see. Bees were everywhere. It was organized like a swarm and it wasn't apparent that any particular hive was being robbed.

The bees were all over the deck - they head-butted me no matter where I walked. Hundreds were flying in circles near my sun porch door. It was almost dark - what was this about? I assume because of the nectar dearth and the relatively low supplies for this time of year, that probably robbing was going on. I approached the two weakest hives and both, while not looking like robbing I've seen in other years, did appear to have some attacking happening on the front landings.

I immediately dropped the propped tops on all three hives and planned to get out robber screens for the two front entries of the hives that looked violated. By the way, opportunists were just waiting. I saw two bald-faced hornets get into the act of violating the hives as well as a couple of yellow jackets.

I went into the house to get the robber screens and angry bees went in with me. Usually they abandon the cause at the door, but not this time. I got the screens and put them on Mellona and Aristaeus2 since both seemed somewhat in distress. I posted on Beemaster to see if someone had an idea about what might be going on, but most of the wise people I depend on were at the Northeast Treatment Free Beekeeping Conference in the northeast and nobody answered for more than 24 hours.


On Sunday the center hive, Mellona, looks OK, but I was worried about the robber screen on Aristaeus 2. When I took it off, there were lots of dead bees behind the screen. By this afternoon (Monday), they had removed the dead and everything appeared to be back to normal. I will open the hive tomorrow and know more about what happened - if they were robbed and what is the state of the hive.

Meanwhile I had a wedding shower at my house on Sunday morning and didn't have the time to rescue with the glass and postcard all the bees that were on my porch. I carried about 20 of them outside that way. But then I am ashamed to say that I vacuumed up the 102 others that were still on the sunporch. I was afraid of having them there with all the people coming to the shower and I didn't have enough time to remove them one by one. So I was part of the hive devastation that happened on Saturday night.




If you click on the picture below to enlarge it, you'll notice in the lower part of the picture a bald-faced hornet attacking a bee.

Unwanted visitor to the bee yard

Yesterday I stacked my unused boxes up in a corner of the deck. Leaving the boxes in the light keeps the wax moth from taking over the frames inside the boxes. I am in the process of removing boxes that the hives don't need so they can get compact for the winter.

I also did a hive combination yesterday and removed a feeder bag from under the Imrie shim. I set the almost empty bag on top of the stack of boxes.


This morning the bag is being worked over by bald faced hornets. I've seen them cannibalizing my bees but never taking sugar water.


Their faces are those that only their mother could love. They look like the stuff of horror movies to me when you gaze at them like this, up close and personal! They even fought among themselves, sending one of the group off to look for live bees to carry home to the nest.



Below is a picture I found on Google of the other cannibal in my bee yard:

The other hornet I see daily in my bee yard is the European Hornet. It seems to be a predator for live bees as is the Bald-faced Hornet. It is brown with a large yellow abdomen. Ugly and threatening, it flies toward bees in the air, trying to snatch them.

Mayhem and Marauders

When a hive is weakened, as Hyron was by robbing, then the bees and the hive itself become a playground for opportunistic insects. Small hive beetles become bolder. Wax moths may be able to lay their eggs and complete a life cycle. And from the outside there are wasps and other marauders such as the bald-faced hornet shown below.

This is not a good picture of the bald-faced hornet because he is curled around a fighting little bee. I watched the hornet capture the bee just as she left the landing deck of the hive. He wrestled her to the ground. She fought a good fight but in the end, the bald-faced hornet, cannibal that he is, carried her off to feed his young.



The ground in front of the hive that was robbed is littered with bees and pieces of bees. I wanted to cry when I saw it up close. They fought valiantly to protect their hive. Luckily it rained for the next two days and the robbing of the hive has ceased. This picture covers about a square foot of the ground in front of the hive and about three square feet look like this.



The bees are cleaning up in earnest. The robber screen makes it difficult. I always marvel when the mortician bee carries out the dead, flying with a body the same size as her own. However, the pile of dead bees in the corner of the robber screen has diminished, implying that the bees are carrying out the dead in spite of the obstacle of the screen.



I've opened the robber screen to give them about a 3 inch entry which you can see at the top of the robber screen in the picture below. The photo shows a bee aiming to land in the entry and you can see bees crawling up the screen from the landing to enter the hive at its new temporary front door.



I opened the hive today to put on a shim and a baggie feeder. I went full suited because this has been a very aggressive hive. There was no queenless roar and no attacks on me. I don't know if that represents their defeatist approach now that the war is over. Maybe the lack of a queenless roar means that the queen is still alive and survived the attack. And then again, it may mean that the queen is dead but they don't have the spirit to care.

I didn't want to open the hive for inspection because it was 7 PM when I got home from work and because they've been through enough right now. Having me tear apart their house after having marauding intruders a few days ago felt to me like adding insult to injury.

I do feel good as a beekeeper that I gave them a big baggie of sugar syrup, protected this time by a shim. I hope this hive can survive. If it's still alive next week, I'll probably combine it with Aristaeus, one of my other swarm hives. I'll especially make this decision if the queen of Hyron is dead.

The Bald Faced Hornet is Back

I watched with dismay today as the bald-faced hornet systematically attacked and carried off bees to feed its young. The hornet swoops down and captures a bee. Just as quickly it flies up to the paper nest in which it lives high up in a tree above my deck. I'm sure the nest is located there to take advantage of the beehive restaurant.

Here's a face-on look at the lovely insect. I think the hornet looks menacing as I'm sure is nature's plan.

I never snapped a picture of the five bees I watched the hornet capture in the space of less than five minutes, but here the hornet has killed a yellow jacket.

Bugs and the bees

Today I found a dead bald-faced hornet, a piece of another dead bald-faced hornet (look to the upper right of the full body and you'll see a body part), a blurry yellow jacket and several ants all around the bee hives.

Within a few moments while I watched another bald-faced hornet was attempting to enter the hives - amazing that the hornet is not deterred by the death of the others.

The ants don't seem interested in the hive, but rather are focused on pieces of pine tree that have fallen on the deck in the recent rain.

Attack of the Bee-Eater

One of the sad parts of inspecting the hives is that bees are killed when I set the supers back in place. Yesterday a number of bees died during the inspection. One bee body was still caught between two supers this morning. Usually by the end of the day, the housekeeping bees have cleaned everything off.

Earlier today I saw the bald-faced hornet again. This time the hornet was carrying off a body that a mortician bee had dropped on the deck about four feet from the hive.

Just a few minutes ago, the bald-faced hornet made an even bolder move. The hornet is eating the bee body left between the supers.


A few minutes after the hornet started eating, the bees noticed. Two bees swooped down and attacked the hornet. They are out of focus (they were really moving fast) but the red arrows on the picture indicate where the bees are.

After several swoop attacks, the hornet flew off, leaving the remains of the bee behind.

I'm concerned about the hornet's continued presence. I watched a video on Youtube about 30 hornets wiping out a beehive in a little over 3 hours. I don't know whether to worry or not.

So far I've seen one dead hornet, killed by the bees and this one being run off by the bees.

Death to the Intruder!

My girls killed a bald-faced hornet who was trying to rob the hive today. This is the second one I've seen that they have killed. The bald-faced hornet is actually a cousin to the yellow-jacket. They live in paper nests that they build out of wood.

Since bald-faced hornets often like to eat live prey, I wonder if the hornet were trying to kill bees rather than steal honey. The bees won, whatever the motive for the visit of the hornet.

It took two mortician bees to try to remove the body. I watched them struggle for at least 10 minutes.

After a while one bee gave up and left the task to her sister. This poor little bee pulled and dragged the bald-faced hornet until she snagged on a crack in the deck between boards.

Finally she abandoned the task when she had dragged the hornet about 4 feet from the hive stand.