The books / Pests, Predators and Robbing / chapter 8 of 14
When it is already bad
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
Sometimes prevention comes too late and you find a robbing attack already underway. The first useful thing you can do is nothing dramatic: do not open the hive further, and do not try to fight the robbers off by hand, which mostly agitates every bee involved. Reduce the entrance as far as it will go, down to a gap wide enough for one defender at a time.
If the attack is severe and still not slowing, wait until dusk, when robber bees have gone home for the night but the hive's own bees are still clustered inside, and close the entrance completely or move the hive to a new spot in the apiary under cover of darkness.
Moving a hive during daylight while it is under attack usually just moves the robbers with it.