I am a real bee newby but he has a very pronounced anxiety that the bees can read. He is uncertain around them and he approaches them like adversaries. Bees are wild but are guided by our interactions by them. It is a very hot hive but the fact that he is just using a bee jacket and is ham fisted is a mystery to me. I think he actually hams it up a bit and acts a bit so that those bees are mad as hell. How do you lose your queen during a check off of a frame on to the ground? He has lots of views and I think that he wanted to crank up the view count by taking an aggressive hive of bees and making them respond.
You've never been around Africanized bees have you?
Nope but I have one hot hive of Italians. We have been having rainy, cold weather alternating with hot sun and afternoon thunderstorms and I have slutest Italian queen since Madonna. I started the hive on May 27 with a 5 lb package of bees. I have two brood boxes and two supers and the brood boxes are completely filled with brood and the queen is working up into the honey super and laying up there too. We are talking from three frames to 25 frames of bees in less than a month. They will be more than 100,000 bees by July. I decided to take a frame of the brood to bolster a weaker hive of Russians who are pussy cats in comparison and I decided to do a hive check with just a bee jacket on. Well, I screwed up and didn't have the zippers tight near the veil. I felt one sting and I said nope because I had about 30 bees that followed the first one in. I dumped the jacket on the way to the house, I dumped my t-shirt next, and my pants which were invaded followed by my undergarments because some how the wrong ladies had worked their way in. In the end, I was naked without bees and my wife who was watching the whole episode got stung for good measure. I ended with 4 stings and no reaction. I went in two days later and they were still ticked. I checked if they were going to swarm or were queenless. Negative on both counts. They have about two dozen guard bees at the front of the hive so if I want to get in there I am wearing a full bee suit and I will smoke the hell out of them and shoot them with 1:1 sugar water as well.
His hive was not africanized. He said that he had taken a frame of brood and moved it to another hive and was going to do a split. They were too hot for his apiary so he decided to kill them. They throw a contractor's bag over the top of the hive up here and suffocate them.
