The books / Pests, Predators and Robbing / chapter 5 of 14
Recognising it
All chapters
- The dangerous weeks
- What a dearth looks like from the hive
- How robbing starts
- The beekeeper rings the bell
- Recognising it
- The entrance reducer
- The robbing screen
- When it is already bad
- Wasps through the year
- Strong colonies repel, weak ones fall
- The trap that works is the spring one
- Mice in October
- Bears
- Leaving them alone
Robbing has a look and a sound once you know them:
- Bees tussle and fall to the ground in tangled pairs at the entrance, fighting rather than simply passing each other.
- Robber bees hover and sway side to side in front of the entrance, testing it the way a burglar tests a door handle, rather than flying straight in the way a hive's own bees do.
- Cappings on the landing board come back torn or chewed rather than smooth, with wax debris scattered where there should be none.
- Underneath all of it sits a roar, a sudden, frantic pitch of activity that sounds nothing like the steady hum of a hive going about its ordinary day.
Any one of these signs alone can have an innocent explanation, but two or three together, on a hot dearth afternoon, mean you are watching a robbery in progress.