[KyBee]

Okay I got this swarm. My bee mentor helped me. I think it's from one of his hives but he is full and couldn't take any more.

So I brought it home in his swarm catching box. A very cool suitcase-like thingy made from either a medium or a cut-down deep with screen wire on the sides and a handle. The swarm is about the size of a big football and a half or maybe almost two footballs.

On the way home my car smelled wonderful. He had given me a frame of drawn comb just out of the freezer and I figured it was that. So I got home and I set the swarm box on my washer and was about to spray them with syrup so they'd have something to eat and I smelled it. The sweetest, warmest scent. I thought, it's the little piece of a limb that's in there with them. But this morning they had moved away from the limb into a big cluster in teh corner of the box and it wasn't the limb or the box. It was the cluster.

It was THE BEES! They smelled SO GOOD!

Nobody ever told me that bees smell good. My packages didn't smell good. By this morning my whole utility/bathroom was filled with that wonderful scent. Of course the packages weren't all from one hive either, and didn't have their own indiginous queen. Could that make a difference?

Does anybody else have bees that smell good? I think I need to market a body lotion named "honeybee cluster". Darn they smelled so good, I hated to dump them in the hive. They're probably not normally gonna let me stick my nose two inches from the cluster without a ruckus.

 

[SilverFox]

Get a mad hive and they smell kinda' like rotten bananas. Cann't explain the oder but it is different.

 

[Jim Fischer]

> ...smell kinda' like rotten bananas.
> Cann't explain the oder but it is different.

That's alarm pheromone. "bananas" is the
exactly description most people who can smell it use.

 

[HarryVanderpool]

There's two odors that I have noticed.
The "alarm odor" perhaps when you have pulled the lid off to fast, or dropped a frame.
The other odor I notice when you have really blown it and the bees are bouncing off your viel and really after you. That odor smells like really strong body odor.
I have assumed that is the pherimone that they "mark" you with.
Have you noticed that one?
But back to the nice smells; the hives sure smelled fragerent after almonds this year!
Can't wait to see what the meadowfoam smells like!

 

[BaldyLocks]

I can always smell the hives from 10 feet away and I absolutely love it. My kids go down about every day and shove their noses into the back of the hive to get a good deep sniff too!

 

[Michael Bush]

The smell of a swarm is Nasonov pheromone. Sort of like lemon pledge with something else added. The smell of a hive is nice, but different from a swarm and different depending on the nectar being worked.

The smell of an angry bee is very reminicent of artificial bannana flavoring (as opposed to real banannas).

 

[tecumseh]

Smell is not an unimportant sense in the bee bizz. A diseased hive smells kinda like rotten eggs and a healthy hive brooding up heavily has this lush earthy fruity smell. The smell of bee venom hanging in the air is another thing alltogether. panther passing in the night...

 

[Beemaninsa]

In early spring, bees work agarita (a local bush in my area). My buddies say the hives smell like dirty socks but I really like the smell.

 

[KyBee]

Checked on them yesterday morning and it scared me to death. Just a couple of bees on the outside acting confused. I thought I'd killed them or something.

But yesterday afternoon when I got back home they were bringing in heavy pollen loads and had gone through half the quart of syrup. Very active hive. Maybe they'll stay. :0) They are a swarm from (we think) a feral hive that my bee mentor cut out of a tree, so it'll be interesting to watch them in comparison to the packages I bought.