You’re not going to believe this, we’re not going to kill our whole colony of crazy hot Africanized bees. Instead, we’re going to do what all responsible beekeepers and real men and woman do, re-queen! Aaaahhhhh. Yeah.
Notice in the above picture, we’re not in the mood to let any bees in our suits… duct tape did the trick!
Our plan is to find the queen, kill her and replace her with a nicer queeny. Crazy?! Yeah, we know.
If you’re into bees, you’ll probably like to hear our detailed battle plan. We have some great advisors. A local non-treatment beekeeper, Danny Unger, we emailed Michael Bush (from The Practical Beekeeper website and author The Practical Beekeeper Volume I, II, & III) of as well as Christy Hemingway (from Goldstar Honey Bees and Author of The Thinking Beekeeper). We came to the conclusion, that this is not a fight we need to back down from. Will it be crazy sweaty in Texas summer heat, labor intensive and take up precious weekend hours… yes! But in the end, at least we stood up and played the game even if we loose! 🙂
Our battle plan has three parts…
1.) Swap the hive locations. This will strengthen our week hive and decrease the population of crazy bees in the Africanized hive. We have two hives, one is very weak with a virgin queen and the other is our crazy hot africanized hive. What this will accomplish is strengthen the weak hive and decrease the population in the crazy hive. We finished this step today. It was 92 degrees, hot and humid. We had on three layers of long sleeve shirts, three layers of pants as well as duct tape in our one weak spot, where our pants meet our boots! 🙂 We didn’t get stung once, but our suits did!
2.) Split the crazy hot hive. This means taking half of the brood (babies) and honey and place it into a whole new hive. Which means, Andrew gets to build another hive next weekend 🙂
3.) Find the queen, kill her and replace her with a new one. Kill the queen! Off with her head! 🙂 lol that makes me feel good to write that 🙂 Replace her with a new queen that’s been shipped in the mail.
All of this will probably take a week or two to accomplish since we do most of our beekeeping on the weekends. So it’ll be about two weeks till we see if our plan worked.
Stay tuned to see how it turns out… we’re going into the lions den of crazy hot bees!
Our Goldstar Top Bar Bee yard right before we went in there and swapped the two hive locations.
I also understand if you place the dead queen at the hive entrance the killer bees will not return to the hive. And with no place to go they will die. Of course replace the bad queen with an European queen so the good bees can inhabit the hive.
And the story continues. I read the first post, now this one – can’t wait to see how it all turns out! You guys are so brave. Not sure I could do the same thing!
I love the duck tape!! Keep us informed, this is exciting. I hope all works out for the best for you!
So glad you did not get stung through your suits this time! Off with the Queen’s head!!!!
Are you sticking with the All American or changing the queen this time?
I try to get our beeking chores done by 11 am. I don’t dress up as much as you did today, and I am always drenched by the time I get done. I can only imagine how hot you were.
Hurrah for requeening! I am glad to hear you have a workable plan. A trio of hives sounds nice.
Glad you got a good plan! Matt and I have been watching for updates on your bees. 🙂
Good for you! I’m glad you didn’t resort to pesticides.