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Of course neither begging nor borrowing is open to them but they know how to steal!

Once robbing has started it is very difficult to stop so the best thing to do is try and prevent it from starting.

Here’s how:

How to Prevent Robbing

• Close entrances down to a couple of inches (or less) as soon as the summer flows have stopped. The smaller the entrance the easier it is for the bees to defend it.  The wider the entrance the easier it is for robbing bees or wasps to slip in unnoticed and a habit is established ;
• Set up a wasp trap but set it up well away from your bees or it will just attract every wasp in town – don’t bait it with honey or you will find it full of your bees;
• Keep all doors and windows to your honey house tightly closed!
• When you feed your bees, feed in the evening so that more bees will have discovered the exact location of their feed during the night and have stopped hysterically doing the round dance;
• The round dance is the dance the bees do to tell each other that there is a huge quantity of this thick nourishing 2:1 syrup really really close to here. When bees witness this dance and receive a sample from the dancer they immediately rush out the door and try and get in next door or the door of the weakest hive;
• It’ s bad practice for disease prevention reasons – but if you deliberately set things out to be robbed make sure it is more than 100m from your hives or the bees will do the bloody round dance and all go robbing each other instead of the thing or things it is you want cleaned;
• Don’t go slopping feed about the place;
• Don’t go to the apiary with an open bucket of oozy beeswax scrapings all reeking of honey – the bees will go mad in quicksticks. Get a cover for your bucket and keep it covered;
• If you have weak colonies – turn them ‘the cold way’ for the robbing season and narrow the entrances to about half an inch. This way robbers at the entrance are facing down the centre frames of the nest – and all the bees are looking back at them! A weak colony set up ‘the warm way’ will not notice robbers slipping in through the entrance and running up the inside of the front wall;
• The cold way is where the box is placed on the floor so that the frames are perpendicular to the entrance block;
• The warm way is where the box is placed on the floor so that the frames are horizontal to the entrance block.

How to Stop Robbing

Once robbing has started your haven’t really got many options.

• You can bung the hive up and take it away;
• You can let the bees rob it out completely – then when they’ve stopped, quietly slip in some frames of feed from elsewhere before they starve;
• Using your imagination and whatever materials you may have at hand – build a little tunnel just one beespace wide and a couple of inches deep at the entrance. Robbers hate the thought of a long dark corridor. Seriously, this can work but only if you have the time, you like a challenge, have a particularly precious nuc and no other options.

Click here for more about wasps

If you’ve got something there I’ve missed – please add it here because it really is a scourge – there’s a contact form at the bottom of the page.

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These great big ones you see early in the year are the queens. The emerge towards the end of summer then, after mating, they overwinter in dark corners of your shed or in the hive roofs. I heard of somebody who would stack lengths of timber with little lats between them to provide tempting crevices to attract hibernating wasp queens. Once they were all tucked in and asleep – he’d go and pull all the lats out for christmas.

You see them in spring as they are building their nests and before any young have hatched. Once the young emerge, they do all the work while the queen stays at home laying eggs all day – or up to common stuff like the one in the photo sticking her tongue out or scratching.

The one in the photo above attracted out attention because it seemed very dark in colour – the top of its abdomen is almost sooty looking. Then we reckoned it was probably  soot. Probably from prospecting for a nest site in the chimbley.

Yes, we marked it but we didn’t clip it and we released it into the wild. We treated it quite well while it was with us – we kept it warm and fed it regularly with honey so we’ll be very interested to see if it comes back.

Click here from more on the life cycle of wasps.

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What you do with them is up to you –  it’s always a dilemma for me. Remember that each one has the potential to create a huge wasp colony of perhaps 15,000 individuals and if you’ve had real wasp problems in the past you know what this can mean for the bees. However they are great in the garden in the early part of the year and only come into conflict with the bees in the late summer. If the bees are strong and you get your entrances narrowed down in time they will be able to defend themselves.

If there seem to be a lot of them you could prune them.

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Trickle treated 35 hives of bees with oxalic acid for Varroa today at 4 apiary sites. The temperature was 6 degrees, windy and beginning to rain. It took from 1.15pm to 4.15pm including travelling time so it has to be said it is the quicker of the two methods. If we had only the one Varrox Vaporiser it would have taken 10 minute per hive – which is nearly 6 hours and without the travelling time.

It has to be said the bees were not pleased to see us. It also has to be said that they are still very well stocked with stores. Most of them were on double boxes or one-and-a-halfs and because they had so much stores they were well down in the boxes so that was a bit of a dilemma: either you disturbed them more by separating the two boxes or you took a gamble and trickled from on high. We did some of each. I’d say the hive is open for no more than 1 minute each if you’re organised and have everything ready.

The only other thing to say is that there was very little problem with brace comb but then we have most of the bees on double boxes or 1.5’s – perhaps with that extra space they don’t feel the need to pack the space between the top bars and the crown board.

We must have found at least 8 hibernating queen wasps and often – stangely enough or perhaps not – 2 per roof – common wasps I’d say, going from the marks on their faces.

• Vespula vulgaris (Common Wasp);
• V.germanica (German or European Wasp);
• V.rufa (Red Wasp);
• V. austriaca (Cuckoo Wasp). V.austriaca is known as the Cuckoo wasp because it is an obligate parasite of V.rufa!

Then there are the ‘long cheeked’ wasps – Dolichovespulae:

• Dolichovespula sylvestris (Tree wasp)
• D. norvegica (Norwegian wasp)

The most numerous are the Common and German wasps and they are very similar to look at. To decide which is which you have to look them in the eye and examine their facial features. The Common wasp has an anchor shaped black patch on the front of its face while the German has an arrangement of 3 dots. Also, the black bands are wider on the Common wasp. Great photo’s here.

Both species mostly build nests underground however they will go into roof spaces but this habit is more often seen in the Common wasp. During the course of the year they will rear between 6,500 and 10,000 workers, 1,000 queens and 1,000 males. Towards the end of the summer the old queen starts to lose her power and she goes off lay. This presents the army of workers with a problems – they have spent the summer gathering insects, chewing them up and feeding them to the larvae. In return the larvae would secrete a sugary syrup which the workers take as food. When the larvae run out the workers have to find another source of sugar and end up throwing their weight about in beer gardens and kitchens. And of course creating problems for the bees.

The other two Vespulae species are less of a problem for humans or bees because their life cycles are different to those above. The Red wasp has a similar anchor shaped black patch on its face but is easily distinguished from the others by the reddish band on the upper abdomen. It builds a much smaller nest and seldom in an urban setting. It is also very much less aggressive and is (apparently) reluctant to sting.

It is parasitised by the Cuckoo wasp, the queen of which moves into the nest as soon as the first workers are up and running. She kills the Red queen and forces the workers to look after her brood which she sets about laying in the cells built for the eggs of her predecessor.  They rear only males and new queens – because they use the Red wasp workers as slaves and do not need their own workers. Isn’t that awful?

The other two also build much smaller nests and although the Tree wasp can be very aggressive they seldom cause problems like the first two. The Tree wasp tends to suspend its relatively small nest from trees and shrubs but it will also nest in relatively small cavities. The Norwegian wasp also builds a small nest in trees or shrubs often quite close to the ground.

The colonies of all of the above species break up at the end of summer and only the new queens overwinter by hibernation. It’s surprising how often wasp queens can be found hibernating inside the hive roofs. In spring they wake up and begin to build their nests. They lay their eggs and they feed the brood themselves until eventually they have workers on the wing after which, the queen lays eggs exclusively and the workers tend the brood. The workers are all female and they all sting – the sting is an adapted ovipositor. The males, which emerge later in the year have no sting. Learn the difference and impress your friends. The very large wasps to be seen on the Cotoneasters early in the year are the queens.

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