Bees are industrious little workers and amazing little creatures. They are efficient and busy. Sometimes they’ll decide it’s more efficient to find a smaller nearby hive and rob the already made honey from them and use it for their own winter stores.
I promise when that happens you’ll want to mount motion sensing water canons on every corner of the hive box! You’ll feel so sad for your poor hardworking little bees getting robbed. However there are some things you can do to help your bees out- possibly giving them the upper hand, or leg…
The first thing you’ll need to do is identify that robbing is a problem. In areas with low resources- drought, nectar dearth, or lots of strong hives around, be extra vigilant. Robbing can decimate a hive very quickly, both in bee loss and honey loss. The funny thing about robbing bees is they actually behave differently around the hive entrance. A fellow beekeeper describes them as “shifty looking” and it’s exactly true. They look like they’re up to no good. They hover in the air around the entrance and tend to swoop in differently than the working bees returning with loads of pollen and nectar.
To help prevent robbing behavior from even starting, there are a couple precautions you can take. Try not to open your hive for inspections on warm afternoons. The smells of wax and honey in the warm afternoon sun is amazing and beautiful to us and it’s a large flashing sign to other bees- warm, fresh honey right here. If you can do your inspections in the earlier mornings or later evenings you’ll be less likely to advertise to the bees of the neighborhood what’s available in your hive.
If you’ve identified robbing bees flitting and hanging around your hive there are some things you can do. First is to reduce the hive entrance. If you put wood or wire across part of the hive entrance you’ll give your bees less gateway to have to defend. They can better fight off intruders when only one or two bees come in at a time. Inside guard bee numbers outweigh attackers.
If you see there’s still a problem, (or you can do both of these things at once to hit the problem faster) you can add a robbing “fence” or screen. The purpose of the screen is to make it more difficult for the robbing bees to find the entrance. The bees coming out of the hive re-orient themselves in the morning and know they have to walk or fly upwards before they fly away, incoming bees only know to fly at the entrance, but find it blocked. An important thing about the robbing screen is to put it in place in the evening after all the bees have gone in for the night. Otherwise, the returning bees will have oriented to the original entrance and will be lost trying to get in when they come home.
The robbing screen you can see is held onto the hive and provides a basic screen in front of the entrance.
The screen is open to the top, but basically blocked on the sides. This one wasn’t made for this box so it’s not a tight fit, but it gives my bees an advantage.
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