robbing

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It is that time of year when most of the blooms are gone. And with those blooms goes the abundance of food for bees. Being ever ambitious, honey bees are going to find dinner even if it means robbing it from a weak hive.

It is also the time of year for doing splits. I recently did three splits but this one was the weakest so I placed it into a nuc with a top feeder. Why a top feeder? Because Boardman feeders encourage robbing. What I did not realize at the time was that this weak colony – with it’s frames of honey and Honey-B-Healthy sugar syrup on top – was still an attractive target for marauding foragers.  I observed robbing ensue:

  • Robbers bob side to side prior to landing as if unsure
  • Residents return heavy loaded with pollen and nectar and land directly
  • Residents leave the hive empty handed from the landing board
  • Robbers leave the hive full of stolen honey and often climb up the face of the hive before launching themselves.  Why, you ask, don’t robbers jump off the edge of the landing boards which – in my case – are at least 18 inches off of the ground? Perhaps it is because the lessons learned from 200 million years of evolution were learned on trees – landing boards only arrived a little more than 100 years ago.

I quickly nailed a robbing screen together that fit this nuc. Robbing screens work by clever trick: resident bees know how to crawl out of their hive and they remember to return by the same route.  Invading bees, however, are drawn by the sweet, floral scents of honey and Honey-B-Healthy which passes easily through the 0.125 inch wire mesh.  Bees are pretty smart but they are not smart enough to figure out that they must first crawl away from the scent if they are to enter the hive. This photograph shows the residents coming and going but the marauding foragers stopped at the gate.