Dealing With Summer Robbing (136)

Episode 136 – Dealing With Summer Robbing

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Jim Tew: Kim, it's the hot days of summer and we're in a heat situation here across the country. My bees are at full power. Even though it's rained some but nectar flow is skimpy or even non-existent. This is not a good day to go work bees. I'm going to get robbing started. It's probably going on some already, but I'm going to get it started if I'm not careful. What's your situation?

Kim Flottum: Well, I think careful is a keyword here. I think the other keyword that you just said, I'm not going to start, and I think that's where you should leave it. Wait until early evening and it cools down or tomorrow morning when it's still cool before it gets hot during the day, but robbing can be disastrous.

Jim: Yes. Well, I'd love to talk about it for a few minutes, if you're up for it, just to see where you're going and what you do with summer robbing, I've called it. Hi, I'm Jim Tew.

Kim: I'm Kim Flottum.

Jim: We're at Honey Bee Obscura, where today we want to talk about yet another summer issue, robbing.

Introduction: You are listening to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the folks behind Beekeeping Today podcast. Each week on Honey Bee Obscura, hosts Kim Flottum and Jim Tew explore the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honeybees in today's world. Get ready for an engaging discussion to delight and inform all beekeepers. If you're a long-timer or just starting out, sit back and enjoy the next several minutes as Kim and Jim explore all things honeybees.

Kim: You know, I've had experiences with major robbing only a couple of times in 40 years, and both of those experiences were with beekeepers who had bees in the backyard, and neighbors I could look through their picture window and see who was at home, or they were that close. If you're out in the middle of nowhere, robbing is still bad for the bees, where you're not going to get things going with people or other bees next door. This is the time of year it happens because there's nothing coming in. You've got a whole bunch of foragers, like you said, your colony's strong, you've got a lot of foragers unemployed, and now one of them brings home a load of honey, and everybody goes, "Where did you get that?" and she says, "Follow me," and over to the hive next door.

Jim: Well, speaking of following you, that's exactly what I'm doing now. That was an interesting thought to me you just put out there. A bee finds a neighboring colony that has some honey, and it's weak, and it really can't defend it, so it's able to take on a load of, what we call, stolen honey, and then they go back home, and they cause all that excitement you just referred to. How does that bee recruit other bees? What if that colony is right next door? Is that going to use a circle dance inside the hive to tell those bees to go look somewhere near you?

We just kind of gloss over that, don't we? That somehow that successful forager got the word back, but I don't really know how they communicated the location that it's the hive right next door. It's been here all summer. It was here all last spring. That's where you want to go, not out by the bird pond or something. I don't know how they communicate that.

Kim: Somebody explained it to me one time, and it made sense. It's that honey that that bee brought home, it doesn't smell like the honey that's already there. She starts doing the dance, and the bees pick up on the odor difference, and now they know that there's honey someplace else. The dance that they do, interestingly, I've heard, I haven't seen this, of course, but I've heard is you don't go anywhere. You don't go 90 degrees left of the sun, or you don't go 120 yards, you don't go anywhere. What you're telling them is go outside and look for the smell, find the smell.

Jim: I like that because I was wondering if our concept of these bee dances are too simplified. Is there yet by odor, behavior, more details given in the dance that lets some know that they're not looking for a flower, they are looking for another nest? Now I'm getting too sappy about bees and thinking they're too smart so let's just stay with the fact that they do a round dance when it's within 10 yards, 12 yards of the colony, transition dance for a bit, and then beyond that, then they dance where they give the direction and all the other more sophisticated things.

Here's the deal, they find that honey, and then they begin to take it on. This time of the year, Kim, how do you work your bees? From this point until fall goldenrod, we have to be aware that we're going to have a tough time getting our colonies open. I think you really came close to addressing this in your first comment early in the morning, late in the afternoon. In fact, I would probably even go more late in the afternoon because they don't have time to get all worked up. If I do it in the morning and I drop some honey on the ground, piece of comb or odors, bee blowers, whatever, then even though I'm going to get out of the colony, I've still got the yard upset and they've got the rest of the day to rob, but just to go out at 11:30 and open a big beehive with 10 other hives in the yard, that's probably a recipe for accelerating robbing. They were probably robbing at a low level already, but all I've done is made a bad situation worse, shoot holes and all of that.

Kim: Yes. The morning thing, I agree with. I've spent a lot of mornings watching the sun come up over the top of a beehive just for that reason over the years, is because I'm out there and they're not even awake yet. Now, I'm not going to go out there early in the morning and probably do a lot of work. I'm not going to tear things apart and move supers around and look at frames and find the queen and all of that. I'm going to be in and out of there. If I'm harvesting, you line them up on your wagon, you use your leaf blower, you get them out of there, you got the super back in the garage and they haven't even woke up yet.

For me, morning works best for a whole lot of reasons. One, it's a lot more comfortable in the morning. It's seldom very humid. It's cooler. Like I said, I haven't had in my bee yard a major robbing problem ever so I must be doing something right or I'm lucky. It's probably the latter.

Jim: Well, would you say that a robbing situation is correlated with the number of hives in the immediate area? Say, if I've got three hives of bees and you get robbing started, it's just going to be bad. If I've got 25 hives of bees in that yard and I get robbing started, it's probably going to be something approaching horrific. How about that? Is the amount of robbing related to the amount of bees available to rob?

Kim: I don't know the answer to that.

Jim: I don't know either.

Kim: When you mentioned this the other day, I got to thinking about how much have I read about robbing in any of the beekeeping books. We've got the commercial beekeeping book put out by BIP, they got one page and it's a small page. My book has one page. It's a bigger page. The first edition of ABC of Bee Culture put out in 1877 had seven pages of how it starts and how do you stop it. Long ago and far away, it used to be a much bigger problem. I think that's because we've learned, A, what not to do to start it, and B, what to do if it does start.

Jim: I've looked at those old books too and you see those pictures of all those contraptions and devices they put on the entrances and cages over the colony you're working and all the efforts they went to. We don't do that kind of thing anymore. When I give a presentation on robbing, I have to use photographs from the 1930s and '40s to show some of the devices that were available because no one does that now.

Kim: We'll take a half step back here and let's think about how it got started. A forager goes out, gets a load of nectar, it's coming home, and because you've got three, four, five, nine hives lined up in a row, she walks into the wrong one and finds, "Oh, my gosh, it's all this honey." She loads up, she goes out, and she's going to take this stuff home because she knows she's not at home. It doesn't smell like home. She finds her home, unloads it. We just talked about that.

The thing to do to avoid that, to start with, is to make every hive in your bee yard hard to get into. Make it easy to defend. You've got a slot in the bottom there that's a hair and a half wider than a bee so that when she comes home and wants to go into the hive, there's four bees on the other side of that blocking her, guarding that entrance, and there goes your problem.

Jim: Yes, there goes your problem, unless they're under heavy attack and a lot of bees are coming. What if 2,000 bees were nosing around that colony entrance? I guess there is some point of overload where those four guard bees are not going to be able to resist it. I agree with you, but I'm saying this is a testy trying situation because the bees are so behaviorally inclined to rob that even if the entrances are reduced, if they keep rattling that doorknob on that hive, they're going to finally overrun the defensive resources there. If we don't do something, they're going to overrun those defensive resources for sure and much quicker, so reduce the entrances.

Kim, can I tell you what an old researcher years ago wrote, Norm Geary? He may not want to be called old, but since I'll call you and me both old, it would be okay to put him in the group, wouldn't it?

Kim: I guess.

Jim: He said that the way we reduce entrances is not the best way. Just to reduce an entrance does nothing more than direct the robbers right to that small entrance, that what would work better is an entrance diversion device. You put a piece of screen that lets the inside bees come out, climb up the screen, find the entrance and fly away. Then when they come back, there's some confusion and there's certainly confusion amongst the robbers trying to get in. Just reducing the entrance to a tiny opening just directs all bees, including the robbers, to that small opening. What do you think?

Kim: I think that makes perfect sense now that you bring it up and lay it out like that. Just reducing the entrance isn't the best way to defend your hive. It's confusing anybody that's trying to get in. That's what will happen. Let me go back half a step. You've got a bunch of bees just are aiming at that little tiny entrance that you left there, the first thing that's going to happen after a couple of bees try to get in there is they're going to get stung by the guards inside and now you've got venom in the air.

Venom's going to get everybody in that hive. It's going to get the bees that are there covered in venom. Pretty soon you've got a lot of bees flying around covered in venom because of the stinging going on at the entrance. That venom doesn't stay home. If there's a breeze, suddenly that venom is wafting over your neighbor's swimming pool, so you've got a bigger problem.

Jim: Yes. Well, since you've made a huge problem out of this, can I think about it for a minute while we hear from our sponsor?

Kim: [chuckles] Sure.

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Jim: Kim, so you've got this situation running wild. We've got to put some parameters on chaos. Let's just say we've got five hives of bees in our backyard. One of them's being mercilessly robbed. Potentially, we've got venom outside the hive. We certainly got venom inside the hive. We've got all this chaos. The other four are not being given a free lunch. They're being investigated too by robbers from our own hives and from the neighborhood. What do you do, Kim?

Kim: I tend to favor overdoing the situation rather than just try and stopgap it, slow them down, whatever. My first choice is-- In my bee yard, underneath my hive stands, I keep things that I'm going to need in the bee yard sometime this year, and a bunch of those are those screen entrances you just talked about. The first thing I do is I get one of those screen entrances on all the hives that are out there so bees can't get out and bees can't get in. You're going to slow it down there. I'm going to bet that your equipment is as good as or worse than mine and I've got gaps up in the top two supers.

Jim: Yes, I got entrances everywhere. You're right.

Kim: Yes. Underneath my hives, underneath the hive stand, I don't have a roll of duct tape. Putting the screen on is going to slow them down, but it's probably not going to stop it. If you're going to have to stop this situation, what you've got to do is you've got to completely isolate all those hives, or at least the one that's being robbed and the one that, if you can isolate it, the one that's robbing. The biggest plastic leaf bag you can find in the grocery store does a good job. It'll cover that hive and you can put it right down to the bottom board.

Jim: Don't overheat the hive though. If we're in the hot summer days like we are now, I put a plastic bag over the hive, and the hives and the sun, then I can just start other issues, but, yes, putting a plastic bag, wrapping that in something to clog up all those small holes and rotted places I've got. I'm painting a pretty dire picture of my equipment, am I not? It's a nerdy secret, Kim, that an old beekeeper has some old equipment. [chuckles] My stuff's not always nice and new, pristine. I make some pretty bad pictures for some of the articles I write, but it's just old beekeeper using old equipment kind of thing.

This robbing thing, to a greater or lesser extent, we see as a problem, and it is. I'd like to suggest, without any science, from the view standpoint, this is a perfectly natural, normal thing to do. If they've got all this population of bees, if there's some food resources available out there, it's just not in flower nectar, it's in stored honey and neighboring hives, and those hives can't defend it, well, let's go get it. From a human standpoint, that's criminal but from a bee, individual colony survival standpoint, it's a perfectly normal thing to do. I think what beekeepers see as a beekeeper-induced problem is more along the lines that beekeepers are just amplifying the bees' behavior to forage on each other when there's nothing else available. Can you make my comments more concise than what I just did?

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Kim: Well, I think you're right. There's foragers out there. They're looking for food, and they're going to find it in a sunflower, or they're going to find pollen in a cornfield, or they're going to find honey in the hive next door, or your neighbor's hive next door, or whatever.

Jim: Or in the garbage dumpster. They're not just going to the neighbor's hives, they're going everywhere trying to find anything to eat.

Kim: Yes. The way to capitalize on that, I think we hit on it is to make sure everybody stays home. Stop those foragers from going out, finding it, and bringing it back, and enticing the rest of her nestmates to, "Follow me," because if you stop that, you can pretty much, he says carefully, pretty much stop the robbing. It won't stop completely because you've got bees that are out somewhere else in the neighborhood coming home, and those bees, they're going to smell the venom that's going on, they're going to smell probably the honey that was robbed, and suddenly, they're starting to get excited too. This isn't suddenly one and done and gone. If you get something started big, you've got a fairly long afternoon looking at you.

Jim: I didn't mean for this to be a discussion on robbing. I meant for it to be a discussion on managing and working summer hives, but the robbing is the primary issue in working summer hives. We get it started, it's there all the time, but we just make it much more convenient. We say, "Well, that little hive's being robbed out, what's wrong with it? I'll have a look at it." I smoke it, open it up, whether what little defenses they had, I've just wiped them out. Now once I close it up, walk away from it, with smoke just having been installed, and frames moved and their defenses overridden, then they have to go right back to work, defending from all their neighbors that are now trying to get in too. I've just taken a bad situation and I've made it worse.

Kim, I had a thought while you and I were talking, that spring and autumn are the times for most of us to actively and enjoyably work our bees. Summer and winter are lesser seasons for enjoying and working our bees. In the summer, you said a bit ago, you have to suit up, you got to put your clothes on but you didn't really comment on the fact if it's already 87 degrees out there and you put on a full suit and a pair of gloves, it's going to be stunningly hot inside that protective gear. Alternatively, in the winter, what is there to do out there just to go check to see if they're alive and you got all your heavy clothes on? Well, that's going to be a short inspection. I found that I do most of my inspection work in the spring and the fall, and that summer and winter is kind of quiet times.

Kim: Yes, I agree. As I'm getting older, I'm doing less in the spring and the fall anyway so-- [chuckles]

Jim: I'm doing less. I know what you're saying. We're doing less all the time, Kim, but you really soften that for both of us and all beekeepers of our type.

Kim: Well, I got to head out here in a couple of minutes, but I think you're right, we were going to talk about something different, but I got into robbing. I think robbing needs enough attention because if you don't know what you're doing or you're not taking care of business, you could have 20 neighbors getting stung 10 houses away. You're probably not going to be able to have bees there anymore. Somebody's going to call the cops. I don't blame them. Robbing can be controlled, it can be reduced, it can be prevented, but you got to do something because otherwise, you got way more troubles than you thought.

Jim: Yes. The only thing I want to add to your list is that robbing should be expected. It's not an unusual event. It's actually a very common event that's going on all the time. We don't mean to but sometimes we make it worse. I've just taught myself out of doing any bee work today, Kim. Today is not a good day to work my bees. I'm going to stay in this air-conditioned room.

All right. I enjoyed talking to you.

Kim: Good idea. All right. Watch your robbing.

Jim: All right.

Kim: Go on and get started.

Jim: I'll talk to you next week.

Kim: Next week. Thanks.

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