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101312 usurpation attempt

28K views 102 replies 27 participants last post by  squarepeg 
#1 ·
photos to come
 
#3 · (Edited)
these are hives 1 - 3, from left to right.

3 was the intended target for usurpation, but they turned on 2, after i blocked 3's entrance.

notice the small beard on the lower left corner of 2

1 seemed to be oblivious to the whole thing.

the queen was found on the ground, in the area directly beneath the hives, and between 1 and 2.
 
#8 ·
yeah, that's what i remember my neighbor saying about them too, (haven't had a chance to talk to him yet). since ahb's are bad about usurping hives and also mean, i am wondering if this is a combined genetic trait shared by the mean old black bees and ahb.

i am also wondering if i could have dna testing done on this queen. i though about checking with the folks down at auburn university about it.

it would be nice to know if this is a survivor of those old dark bees, or maybe the ingress of ahb genes.
 
#11 ·
just discovered that wikipedia identifies the 'german black bee' as amm. how cool is that. plus, they are described as being 'runny' on the frames, another characteristic in common with ahb.
 
#14 ·
Years ago I used to work with AMM's, they did not try to usurp other hives.

Also, if it was a usurpation attempt, the dead queen would likely be from the target hive rather than the attacker. I think the queen is a carniolan, not that it's really possible to tell from the pic, but just there's not many AMM's around now, anywhere varroa has gone.
 
#16 ·
Wouldn't Occum's Razor indicate AHB. A. AHB are known to do this, usurp. B. German Black Bees, aka apis mellifera mellifera are not known to usurp. C. Amm are extremely rare is not nonexistant anymore. Therefore, does it not follow that this is probably an AHB invasion?

Like Michael Palmer wrote, they can be tested to determine %AHB. Collect a sample of bees from under the bottom board into a jar of alchohol and send them to be tested. Check w/ your State Apiarist for how best to do that.
 
#17 ·
oldtimer, the queen is dead because i killed her. she was in a very small cluster below the hives, apparantly waiting for the usurpation to play out.

mp, i would like to have someone check this queen out, any suggestions? fusion power is in the next county over, maybe he will chime in.

mark, luckily, i caught this happening not long after it started. there were maybe 50 - 100 dead bees on the ground below hive 3. i thought about saving some, but i assumed it would have been a mix of usurpers and hive 3 bees.

another thought.... there have been several very small swarms issuing from hives in my area within this last several weeks. i determined that one of these from my yard was not a reproductive or overcrowding swarm, but rather a supercedure where the queen left with a few 'loyal attendents', as walt wright put it.

could this usurpation attempt really just have been one of these fall supercedures desperate for a place to go?
 
#21 ·
old timer, after thinking a bit more about what you said, maybe it is possible that the queen i caught was the original, and had already been chased out. she only had a couple of dozen attendents with her. most of the usurpers were crawling and bearding on the hive.
 
#25 ·
Couldn't this also just been a virgin coming back from mating? This is very common since lots of hives will replace queens in the fall. What makes you think it was a usurpation attempt? I've never witnessed such an event. I'm not saying you're wrong, just seems pretty rare to me. Of course I'm outside AHB territory. Have you opened hive 3 to see if there were open queen cells? I hope you're right.
 
#91 ·
thought it was ursurpation because of all of the fighting, dead bees, bearding on the hive, and queen on the ground close by.

no queen cells found in hive.

so far, no ahb confirmed in alabama.

queen on ground could have been a virgin, not sure.
 
#28 ·
it was a no brainer something was bad wrong.

i could hear the commotion all the way across my yard. when i got to the hive, there were many hundreds of bees in the air, and all over the hive, and even bearding. not to mention all the fighting at the entrance and the 100 or so dead bees on the ground.

my first thought was, robbing! oh s...! and the thought of instant karma came to mind because of all the robbing i talked about in the other thread.

but i soon realized that it would have more likely been because of me.

what i mean is i moved this hive to the stand last weekend, from about 100' away.

it was in a nearby location, which just happened to be where it was caught, by flying into my swarm trap on 042612.

it was a small swarm, about a half a deep of bees, i gave it a frame of mostly capped brood and that was it.

without feeding, it was able to fill the deep and one and a half mediums. that top super is 100% drawn and 70% full. the bottom super was added with foundation only, to serve as slatted racks, but there is brood comb now drawn on it extending the brood nest part of the way down on the middle most frames.

my mistake, (or possible mistake, who knows?), is that instead of waiting until later in the season, i went ahead and moved them last week.

it was my first time to relocate a hive within my home yard without first taking the hive five miles away to my out yard.

i followed MB's (micheal bush) advice and used leafy cedar branch tips stapled over the entrance. it worked fine, and no bees were left at the old site.

but, i realized that i forced a 'colony decision' (per MB) on the bees, by making them reoriente.

i also realize that the usurpers could have still found and invaded the young colony at the original site, so, we'll never know.

anyway, i'm thinking robbing, and decide to close them up and move them, when out of the blue, my mentee says, 'hey, look at the pile of bees under the hives".

hmmm, i says, the only time i see them doing that is when there is a queen.

so, low and behold, there her majesty was. caught her, and maybe missed out on on letting some rare genetics into my yard but, but i figured i didn't really want them anyway if the traits included usurpation.

do i do right?
 
#29 ·
update:

still a little fighting today and some dead bees, but not as many. i guess those usurpers just had no where else to go.

i think it's like a newspaper combine without the newspaper.

i found the email i got from beltsville regarding my afb sample i sent earlier this year.

i sent a new email tonite, with a link to this thread, and asked for advice on how to get the bees tested.
 
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