By John Berry
This subject is important to me. When I was young I was working a poorly sited apiary beside a road when a girl walked past. If I close my eyes I can still hear her screaming. She ended up in hospital and I ended up with a lifelong passion for breeding quiet bees and keeping my apiaries as far away from the public as possible.
There is nothing new about aggro bees, bees have been stinging us for as long as we have been collecting their honey. The average hive in New Zealand is pretty quiet although not quite as quiet as they were 10 years ago. That’s partly because of hybridisation between Italian and Carniolan and partly because there are more beekeepers, many of whom aren’t doing rigorous selection. 58 years ago when I got my first hive they were not as uniform when it came to temperament. There were some beautiful Queens and the best of ours came from beekeepers like Jasper Bray in the South Island.
It’s so long ago it’s hard to really remember just how quiet they were, but I can certainly remember just how unquiet the local Apis mellifera mellifera and their hybrids were. I remember Jack Landman telling me that when he used to work these with my father as a young man that they would put on their veils at the gate before entering the paddock with the bees and not take them off again until they were well down the road.
Jack left beekeeping to become a teacher, but after retiring he came back to work for my father part-time, mainly in the woodwork. I used to take him out for the day sometimes and he just couldn’t believe that we could put our veils on in the yard and take them off before leaving. That’s what 50 years of intensive selection for gentleness can do.
I still get stung. Getting the odd sting is probably good for your immunity and most of what I get come from doing something stupid like accidentally squashing a bee when I take my veil off.
The worst night I ever had was when I had to cut the ropes on a truck load of hives to stop the truck rolling over and then put all the hives back together again. I reckon I got about 150 that night and definitely felt a little bit off the next day. That was with a full set of protective gear on and there were thousands of stings stuck in my clothing.
I select for a lot of traits in a breeder; production, health, non-swarming, frugal with winter stores, ability to defend from predators (other than me) and always temperament. I breed from two-year-old Queens that produced well above average for two honey seasons. With luck I ended up with half a dozen out of a thousand candidates and I would bring these to my home apiary where they would get one final test. That involves working them in, shall we say, suboptimal conditions, usually either very late in the afternoon or ideally on a cold, crappy, drizzly day. There are normally one or two that will fail this final hurdle.
A surprising number of otherwise gentle bees will lose it on a bad day. As a commercial beekeeper you often need to work bees when conditions are not perfect. This is unpleasant enough without being stung up every two minutes.
When you raise cells/queens from what is left they tend to be similar in temperament to the parent hives. Even if these new queens mate with some of the less desirable local stock their drones, which come from unfertilised eggs, carry only their mother’s genes and in time your better genetics will dominate.
A large part of the bees temperament comes from genetics, but there are a myriad of other things that affect how bees interact with you.
Bees on a honey flow (apart from, for some reason, sometimes the first day of the flow) will normally be very mellow.
Old bees that have survived winter always seem to be a bit more cantankerous (and I don’t care what the scientists say, their stings hurt more).
A weak hive will be less aggressive than the same hive at full strength.
Weather obviously has a big impact and high humidity generally does nothing to improve their tempers. Some areas just seem to have worse tempered bees on average and the place that I have seen this the most was the Coromandel. Something about the climate up there made even the best hive turn a bit nasty.
As beekeepers we should never forget that bee stings are painful and for some people can be very serious and even fatal.
Kowhai nectar doesn’t seem to make the hives in general grumpy, but it does turn some individual bees into complete berserkers which will sting you on the eye without any warning or provocation.
Apple scented shampoo really winds the bees up, don’t use it. I am pretty certain that some horticultural sprays can also wind the hives up and I have worked bees that were wound up like African killer bees to the point where it was scary. These normally placid bees were near a vineyard and spray seems the likely cause for their temperament. The next visit they were perfectly normal.
Aggression is something that will spread from hive to hive and having one stroppy hive in an apiary will upset the rest. Some beekeepers are also just better at keeping hives calm and I have worked with people that just didn’t seem to be able to work hives without upsetting them and then their upset bees would come upset mine.
There is a way to working around bees that only the bees can teach you. Listen to them and learn. As a commercial beekeeper I wear a veil and gloves the vast majority of the time, but when I’m just mucking around at home on a nice day I am very happy to work without them. I would never breed from anything that you couldn’t work without a veil, but beginner beekeepers usually benefit from wearing one at least until they become more experienced.
Apart from anything else, new beekeepers usually take a lot longer to do basic beekeeping jobs and the longer the hives are open the more likely the bees are to become aggressive. Reopening a hive shortly after you have finished with it is a really good way to get stung.
If you do open a hive and it just goes ballistic, for whatever reason, it often helps just to freeze for a few seconds. I don’t know why but this will often defuse the situation, at least to some extent, and it can be surprising how quickly they lose interest in you.
Your smoker is always your first defence against aggression, but it should be used as minimally as possible and I have found on really nice days with a good honey flow you often don’t really need it. I am not a fan of going around and smoking every hive before you start. Smoke is most effective immediately after use and from then on you have to use more smoke to get the same effect.
The less smoke you use the quicker the hives will return to normal after your visit.
I have always shifted hives without blocking them in and, except when we do this in the daytime on really cold winter days, we shift at night. The secret is to pick them up as soon as they stop flying and before dark. A quick puff of smoke and straight on the truck, they will normally be quiet all night.
Pick them up after dark and they will crawl out of the hives looking for something to sting, smoke often doesn’t help and sometimes makes them worse. Gentle hives will be better, but if you are picking up hives by hand after dark you better have some pretty good gear on. Before dark I don’t usually bother with any.
It can be difficult at times to get a really stroppy hive to accept a new queen. I would never euthanise a hive because of aggression, but I would certainly kill the queen and replace it with a cell from a good breeder. With a really angry hive, which is something I haven’t seen for years, I might place the cell between two frames of brood swapped from a quiet hive.
It is always a good idea not to disturb a hive with a new queen until she has sealed brood, as disturbance can cause the bees to ball the new Queen and kill her. This behaviour is particularly prevalent with aggressive hives, but I have never come across a hive I couldn’t win the battle with eventually.
I have only ever had two hives that were so unbelievably angry I had to mark them for special attention and both these were on the Coromandel Peninsula. Before I could requeen either of them one had stung up the local government apiary inspector who just happened to be the only one I didn’t like and the other was subject to an attempted theft and I found it on the side of the road beside its apiary. I never caught the thieves, but those bees did.
I have heard all the arguments for keeping strains of bees with a bit of aggro, but I have found no truth in any of them. Aggro bees are no more resistant to diseases, wasps, cold or anything else than well-bred bees and in my experience they tend to be poor producers and often more prone to diseases like chalkbrood.
The one exception to this would be the odd really vigorous hybrid, but hybrids are no good for breeding from. All our bee stocks in New Zealand are of course hybridised to some extent and that is one of the reasons we can select, over time, for all those desirable traits that make beekeeping more pleasant, more profitable and – let us not forget – safer for everyone.
John Berry is a retired commercial beekeeper from the Hawke’s Bay, having obtained his first hive in 1966, before working for family business Arataki Honey and then as owner of Berry Bees. He now keeps “20-something” hives.
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