I got a call last night night from a pest control company wanting me to gather up a swarm at a nearby housing plan. Home owners were setting up for a yard sale Friday afternoon, and a honeybee swarm was landing on the front of their house.



Wife and I went over this morning to collect them. I could stand on a retaining wall, they were within arms reach. My wife held the plastic tote, and I knocked them in. They weren’t gonna fit in a five frame box I had in the Subaru, so I had to haul them home in the tote. Got them into a ten frame deep in the bee yard. There was close to a five gallon bucket of bees. My wife could feel the weight when they dropped into the tote.

Wow! That's the biggest swarm I've ever seen.

Keith

great swarm.

How do you tell if they're Africanized or not?

thank you Jesus , and please work on the fur market Life is good

No Africanized Bees this far north. Can’t survive winter. These were really gentle bees.

They said the same thing about here, but they've adapted. Resistance is futile! LOL

You don't have africanized.

Little known factoid. Extreme defensiveness isn't just a trait of A.m. scutelata the old "dutch" bee A.m. mellifera was particularly known to be nasty tempered and are the sole reason honey bees are still feared by the public to this day.

If you don't know the subspecies A.m. scutelata is the Savanah bee subspecies native to Sub-Saharan Africa while A.m. mellifera is the Heather bee subspecies native to western Europe and the British Isles. The former wasn't introduced to the Americas until the 1950s, the latter in 1620 and was THE bee in common use for over two centuries until imports of the gentler Italian and Carniolan, A.m. ligustica and A.m. carnica respectively, were first started in 1860. The "dutch" bee wasn't fully supplanted in beekeeping until mid to late 20th century and it's genetics can still bee found in feral stocks.

There are well known and documented reports of extreme aggression occurring with crossbreed stocks between the various subspecies. Brother Adam tells of this in his writings detailing the construction and breeding of his Buckfast strain. It is also a known trait of F1 crosses on Russian bees which are a Carniolan strain. This is why the Russian Queen Breeders Association have very stringent controls on their breeders that includes testing of stocks.

Huge swarm. It might be two or more that merged.

Largest I ever saw was a massive one that would've filled a potato sack on the edge of a commercial beeyard. The result of several boxes in that 50+ box yard throwing a swarm and they just all come together.

Another little known factoid.

Africanized doesn't always mean extreme defensiveness. The carribean has been completely taken over by africanized bees.

This includes Puerto Rico and for still not fully understood reasons the bees of Puerto Rico are gentle.

Warrior,,,just curious, are any of those strains or hybrids any more resistant to mites or other nasties?

The nasty bees here in Pa. are the German honey bees. Not a lot of colonies left….those that are here are feral. Some are almost solid black, seem smaller than 5 banded Italians.

But you’ll catch some swarms occasionally that you’ll see a few black bees. The queen, during her mating flight , must have met up with a German drone, along with other drones.

As pure subspecies, only scutelata has shown any sort tolerance or resistance to mites. Lots of speculation but nothing definite, mostly around their shorter emergence times from the larval cell. A.m.m. was highly susceptible to american foul brood in particular and european in general.

The Russian bee of today shows mite resistance and are nothing more than carnica or carnica/caucasian cross possibly other Eastern European subspecies that were found in Eastern Russia that had long term exposure to mites. Before them it was "Yugo" bees which were pure carnica.

But it appears that all subspecies or at least the dozen or so that make up our American mutts have genes that can be useful as the Minnesota hygienics are phenotypic Italians and the VSH genes can be developed or bred into most any stock.

Had a neighbor that swore by his Dutch bees, I swore at them. The most unpredictable bee I ever fooled with. Some days they were as good as Italians other days you couldn't get within fifty yards of them. Even on good days they were runny on the comb and would hang off frames and fall off at your feet. The only good that I remember was that they made the prettiest pure white cappings that I can recall.

The neighbor that taught me ran all star Italians, those were some good bees. But I'd love to see those pure white capping again might make consider having a box or two of those black bees.

That's quite a swarm!

I once had 5 swarms join together in a cluster. I saw the first swarm start to settle into a tree and started to get my stuff together. Before it was over I watched 4 more swarms emit and join the first one. I use semi-deeps exclusively and it took 7 to get them all inside. It was quite an operation to move them away from the tree to a permanent location.

Were these 5 swarms coming from the same hive, or multiple hives?

The strongest hive in my yard was also the meanest. I named it Mr. Mean. You could not work the hive unless a good honey flow was on and a beautiful day.

Used to be some black bees show up mentor said must be fron Dadant's Midnight strain they ran.