Africanized Honey Bees Attack, Why do they do that? What should you do? Beekeeping Lesson

okay so first we just want to know you called me up and asked me to come over because your bees are behaving differently yes very aggressive and you have farm animals like the chicken that you're holding we have chickens and pigs which looks like a barred Plymouth Rock oh yes okay and she's been stung by the bees she's been stung I don't know how many times she was stung I had another one that was completely covered by them and you said you couldn't even see what color the chicken was you can see the chicken hardly you could see her feet and that was about it okay and they are honeybees they were definitely honey do you know for sure if they're bees from your own apiary we don't know we assume they were okay but because we didn't see any rogue swarms or anything right so we assumed they were okay now what other livestock do you have that you're worried about right now we have also have pigs we have a mama baby three babies and a dad and the bees were just I mean you can see that literally looks like dots all over them from where the bees just were stinging them like crazy and some of your chickens are have died yeah these things some I have two that have died that I know of and there were a couple that were still out back that I couldn't get to because the bees were still being a very aggressive okay so this one I could get to she was laying there with her head drooped down and I got her in the house made sure the bees were all off of her gave her some benadryl benadryl okay so did she show some swelling and some she able to walk on her own and walk just now starting to sit up okay she had a very droopy head she was laying off to her now was she outside when the bees went after her yes now your husband said that the hogs that you have the bees actually went in the hog shed yeah they were in the chicken we have the the chicken coop it's like a dual-purpose building and they were in there they were covering the windows on the inside so bad you could hardly see out of them the bees were inside covering the windows because they're trying to get out following the light yes okay and you yourself got afraid and you had to go inside the house right so even when your husband was outside they were did he get bees all over him about 50 times 50 times okay and he has not been to the beehives themselves to see which one might be hot no we haven't been able to this is the first time we've actually been able to even get outside okay so now you want me to look at them so we're kind of prepared to look at the bees and are you okay with if the bees you turn out to be extremely unreasonable let's say are you okay with me exterminating your piece okay so we're prepared we don't use chemicals or anything on them what we'll do is we're doing all this video ahead of time because once we're getting near the end of the day the sun's starting to set and we expect the field bees the foragers to be heading back so we want them to have as much of the colony inside okay there was one just led by so that didn't act like a guard that was just zipping by but if we pick up a guard we're gonna seat up right away you're obviously already covered I'm wearing a maximum protection BC and and so I'm ready to put a bag over them and I've brought honey bee healthy with me instead of smoke okay because it's gonna do two things it's gonna overdoes them with a scent which will prevent them from communicating their threat pheromone so my plan is once we approach the hives if they do start to respond in a hot way and we'll know right away because it will get a disproportionate number of darts will come out and they won't back off even if you walk away Africanized bees or bees that are really hot like that will follow you 100 yards or more they followed Scott down the road okay so you actually walk down the road kept going okay and that's the other thing people need to know if you guppies Oliver you don't run inside your house no just stand perfectly still and wait and it can take a half-hour or longer for them to calm down yeah he walk away because he was trying to get away because he had gotten stung so many times okay he was starting to panic a little bit he was worried he was gonna have an allergic reaction is he allergic to bees normally yes he took benadryl and passive right now he's doing well he smokes out locally but he should not take a risk at all in other words if they come out and act angsty we are going to make sure he and and you guys will go inside for safety and I'll just deal with it myself now the bees actually came into this building and then they were all clustered on the windows okay because they follow light so the bees would be trying to get out I see you've got some polish some maybe are those red comets and white leghorns and up here you've got your birth rock and we're white leghorns and Americana over here which is people don't know is the Easter egg chicken what color eggs is she laying like cream and most people want that baby blue and they're not normally in this area right now did the chickens running on their own when the bees were after them like how did the chickens respond on we've got some eggs alright so now what kind of hogs do you have here these are American guineas American guineas and these are the young ones and the mother's in the background there now who receives the most stings from the bees I think the mother okay now it's his behavior right now normal for him or no so he would be up walking around so we have no idea how many stings he's gotten and so did you do any preventive medication okay now that's the problem - we have farm animals so we've got the Hogs here and most vets aren't used to calls about hey my hog was stung about 100 bees so you don't it's not a medication you would have handy oh so you've just got them so even the young so these were okay where did you go okay so now do they raise this breed specific okay so now the young ones here are they normally laying around like this - or would they be up and active inactive when you're here okay so it's close to them so they've also we don't know how many times I've been stung now can you do you know specifically where the stingers are actually they were in the ears but I see they have a lot of mud on their ears all right they were in the mud we tried to wash them off when the bees were attacking him without the hose well that was a good move washing them down with water okay and the other thing is it doesn't help that your hogs are black no the bees if they're hostile are ready or defensive they would certainly be threatened by black furry animals okay so now I'm gonna go and look at your beehive now that we have background on everything I'm gonna go and look at your colonies and see if I can solicit a defensive response from one of them and then we'll know more about what the bees are doing and we'll decide what to do about them from there does that sound good yeah okay okay so in the background offensive okay and you pass them how many years about two there been no changes in the bee population you have not reeked weaned no and here's one be a zip and by which student back to ready so what I'm gonna do is we don't know which one but we can see the freshly mowed path here so we know he mowed right in front of all right so as a tractor I'm guessing no return zero turn okay so a powered mower when it goes by vibrates the ground and the bees will respond to that vibration now which of the colonies would you consider to be your strongest and you've got a flow hive on the very end of that fill up this year okay we're not talking about the FlowHive anymore I'm gonna edit that part out okay all right so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take the video camera with me and I'm gonna walk and stand directly in front of each colony we have not smoked them I have Honey B Healthy with me as my interrupter if I need it and if there's a defensive response we're gonna get it now that's so and just for people that are looking at this that are on YouTube or whatever learning about these the wrong place to be at any bee hive is directly in front of the landing board so that's where you're in their way that's where they're doing their business if you want to visit bees and not antagonize them you stand to the side or to the back where you keep your distance I'm not gonna keep my distance because I haven't gonna solicit a response cause we're trying to find out who the culprits are that are attacking what we want sound good yeah okay okay so this is that's normal landing board activity there tell me to go and listen to their wing sounds too - that's a nice pink whose idea was that and you bought all these boxes for mann-lake is that right yeah okay okay now where did you come by that one and this is a very old box and what I want you to see on this one is that bees can chew the wood they can make their own exits these bees are kind of doing their own venting here and nobody cares and I'm standing here here's a really populated one it's painted red red is an angry color mm-hmm let's get right down here and see if they care these bees don't care now Africanized bees wouldn't really let me get this close pretty normal landing board here down here we got an immediate response and these bees are behaving in a highly defensive manner response Guards are flying out and expanding the attack zone They are stinging the microphone and camera The other colonies are behaving normally and are non-defensive These are all normal and are not reacting to the orange hive behavior now they're actually trying to dig into the windbuffer and openings They are so tenacious and are pressing into small openings The bees are all over the camera and the microphone The behavior is unprovoked we did not touch the hive and are being stung on the suit and gloves You can see more guards coming out from the hive and going after the camera, me and extending their defensive circle This colony in the orange hive is definitely the source of the earlier attacks. so now we're gonna spray some honey-B-Healthy in there and see what happens see if we can distract them with sweets and pheromone Honey-B-Healthy will masque they're defensive scent okay so I want you to look at this is the camera I'm using when I'm looking at the colonies up close it backed off a little bit but the bees are burying themselves in the microphone and they're coming after the camera itself and they're coming after me but we're you know less than a hundred feet from the colonies and it's a hot hive for sure probably have is there live stocks been injured their chickens are being killed and their bees have attacked their hogs so it's no longer safe for those bees to be around and we have to change the stock we're actually going to kill the entire colony entire colony and I'll explain why later okay so now that we're safe and sound back in our own neck of the woods here and back at my own backyard apiary I wanted to recap a little bit about what just happened or one of the caution people about being over sensational about African bees Africanized bees and just generally bee colonies that have become hot and unmanageable what happened at that farm is actually extremely rare in fact I don't know of a single farmer or beekeeper in my part of the country that's ever had to deal with honey bees that were so defensive that they started killing off livestock that's a very a significant event but it's a cautionary tale as well we don't want people to overreact and begin rejecting honeybees from backyards all over the place because of the concern regarding how they could behave it's highly unusual for bees to kill livestock but if you had bees in your apiary that get to the point where they're so defensive that they're coming after you and your pets and your livestock you have to personally be prepared to deal with those bees which may involve even killing them off now as it occurred here because they had livestock that were dead because if they had not had bee suits on it's likely that they would have been at the very least a medical emergency it is very important to talk about the fact that you have to kill off bees like that and I don't just mean hunt out the Queen and take her out of the scene I mean take the genetics out completely so you have to kill off the entire colony now how did I instruct them to do that I was going to stay and do it with them after nighttime so that when all the bees had come in they'd have maximum numbers in that colony I left them with 55-gallon black plastic trash bags and packaging tape the cellophane type that is airtight and they were confident that after it got dark they would wrap up that colony and seal it off so that the bees inside would fairly quickly suffocate they didn't want to use any kind of poisons and I agree with that don't use any kind of insecticide in a beehive and they wanted to get the honey and resources out of that colony and of course once the bees are gone they could recycle those resources to the other bees and their apiary so what happened there what's going on those beets had been under their care for a couple of years in fact the colony that had the problem was calm up until now it had made it through winter which was a big deal because we had a significant winter last year so what's going on well somewhere someone's got genetics that are hot and those genetics branched out and affected that colony of bees I want to talk a little bit about Africanized bees now an Africanized bee is different from the African Killer Bee itself the African Killer Bee is a genetic line it is a species of bee the Africanized bees are those that have had genetics mixed with other genes of bees that were normally calm that have become overly defensive because of that interbreeding so that is why it's very important to get those bees out of the genetic line in your area so there we're gonna wrap them up kill the bees completely what if they kept just killed the Queen and left the drones in there well now the drones can carry those genetics to other bees in the area so that's a no the other thing is what if they just kept the brood and strengthened some other colonies with that well the Brit that hatches out it has such genetics and would also be hot so when they graduated from being nurse bees and store keeper bees in the colony they ultimately would become the guards of that colony and you'd have a similar situation so you want to kill them all that's just the way it is now the other thing is sometimes people will hear about colonies like this and use it as an argument to keep people from keeping backyard bees in urban areas or areas where there will be a lot of people I'd say the argument is actually for more people keeping manageable calm lines of bees because there are areas where bees are and if the Africanized bees are moving in they need to meet with resistance there need to already be colonies of bees of the type that you want present in the area and that creates a slower buffer zone for the progress of those Africanized bees Africanized bees are very different from other bees and one of the behaviors that they have is that a normal B colony when they're going to reproduce they'll generate a swarm and that means the old Queen will fly out and she'll have a good number of the colony of bees with her and then the remaining bees in that colony will generate a new queen and then she'll hatch and continue on in place some of the Africanized bees don't do that when they send out their scouts to find other colonies to look into they may actually vacate the hive that they're in completely so it's not being superseded it's not reclaiming they just move out in masse and they will do a hostile takeover of another bee colony that's not as strong and then they just killed the Queen they move in and they assume all those resources including the bees that are already there they just take them over through strength and aggression so it's a type of honeybee coup so the thing is you want to control the genetics as much as you can try not to work with hot hives somewhere around that farm there has to be some hot bee line now here's the problem with beekeepers that don't register some beekeepers are not friendly they don't talk to other beekeepers they don't want anybody to know about the bees are working with they don't know what anyone to come and inspect their stuff so they don't register and there are prone to sometimes work with bees that other people wouldn't touch because some of these hotter hives some of these more defensive hives also may be super productive so you may be getting a lot of honey from them and for some people managing a colony of hot defense of bees doesn't seem to bother them they just suit up and they're well protected and they feel like they're geographically isolated enough that that's not a big deal well I'm here to tell you that it is a big deal because we want to exploit the good traits of the honeybees and part of that should be the honeybee behavior and how docile they are and how easily people will be able to manage them especially when it comes to a situation like this where the bees were coming out and actually killing I've stock these people were in bee suits and the husband had to actually go all the way down the road Africanized bees are so defensive they'll chase you more than a thousand feet 1,500 feet 1,600 feet before they back off now my personal experience with their bees was that they are very hot hive I wouldn't call him a five-alarm Africanized bee colony but let's keep in mind they did attack the livestock they did kill their chickens and had these people not been in bee suits they could have been at the very least a medical emergency so it's not to be taken lightly and you need to have an action plan hopefully so that if you ever encounter bees that are going to behave like this you need to be prepared to isolate those bees and take those genetics out it isn't a time to try to salvage you know the resources that you can other than the honey and the comb and things like that take that by all means but when it comes to the livestock itself you need to take them out you need to kill them it doesn't mean you hate bees that means you're trying to protect the lines of bees that are favorable and they're not threatening to people and livestock and you're trying to deter those bees that are so defensive that it would actually kill something now to give you a quick recap about the family that had these bees those hot bees and that hive did last for several days wrapped up in that black plastic she wrote me several times saying that they thought that they were dead they couldn't hear anything they figured you know they must be suffocated because it's all sealed up and then they got to open it and there they boil out again and they were back in the situation so again I kept offering I will come and I'll use co2 and knock them out and then we'll really seal them up but they still feel confident that they're gonna handle it on their own I do want to give you a recap too about the hogs that they had they're back on their feet they're doing okay other than the chickens that were killed the one that she was holding in her arm it's you know they're back to normal the chickens are back to normal their farm is good and other than that hive itself the other colonies are just fine so again thanks for watching this video please don't over sensationalized offensive honey bees but I do also want you to be prepared to cope with these that may not behave in a way that's safe for people and animals thanks for watching and look for links below for the suits that we wore that's pretty much it you saw the cameras that I'm using I don't see any need to market those but I'm sorry that you couldn't hear a lot of my narrative when I was dealing with the bees they attacked the microphones they attacked the windscreens and they weren't just trying to sting them they were trying to work into the scenes so they were really really intensely trying to get into every little opening so if you had had cuffed pants or if you didn't have good seals around your whole bee suit those bees were definitely going to get in through all the seams because they intensified at all the contrast areas trying to work their way in so by no means were those normal behaving honeybees thanks for watching stay alert and I appreciate any comments that you have down below and I would be happy to discuss your observations thanks again

Channel: Frederick Dunn

Views: 663,253

Keywords: Africanized, honey bee, invasive, species, killer, bee attack, sting, facts, dangerous bee species, hives, dying, kill, apiary, bee yard, management, colony, killing, stop

Id: Uy0pIevlh7k

Length: 25min 34sec (1534 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 30 2018