Rebel bees swarm despite efforts to rehome

JULIA WADE

14 March, 2022

Kaiwaka’s recently-discovered massive honeybee swarm have rebelled against the care of local beekeepers, and in a unanimous mass exodus have buzzed off into the wild.

Found last month hanging among the branches of a puriri tree on Andy Davis’ Mountain Road property [Mangawhai Focus, Feb 14] the huge wild hive delighted local bee lovers with its estimated population of over 60,000 and hive length of nearly a metre. However, a decision to relocate the honeymakers into box-hives in order to protect them from the crippling Varroa mite unfortunately backfired with the rebel bees first disappearing into the unreachable canopy of a totara tree.

In the relocation operation, which took ‘quite a few hours’, Waipu Beekeepers Club president Hamish Fryer and a team of local helpers carefully sliced the substantial hive into sections on Valentines Day, February 14.

“The little rascals actually escaped a couple of times… we got them in the four boxes after finding the queen and put her in the bottom box but the next day they swarmed,” he says. “So I went back to Andys, found the queen again and put her in a ‘queen excluder’, which is a mesh cover barrier queens can’t get through as she’s bigger than other bees.”

A ‘queen excluder’ restricts the larger queen from entering parts of the hive while allowing the smaller worker bees to move through. Fryer suspects that as there were no new eggs found in the box-hive, the worker bees were not feeding the queen, allowing her to escape through the excluder.

“Normally the workers feed their queen up so she can’t fly and will stay in the hive, so when they want to swarm they’ll starve her down so she shrinks and can then fly,” he says. “However, if the queen takes too long to lose weight and they want to go, they’ll start jumping on her and push her out of the hive.”

Although the queen was relocated and placed back in a box-hive with ‘the others just marching in once they got her scent’, an hour later the bees swarmed once again and have not been seen since Fryer says: ‘Born to be free that one’.

“It’s a real shame as these bees had a really nice temperment and it was a good strong hive, but for whatever reason they decided against the box-hives, sadly they probably won’t survive the winter.”

As the bees will have to make a new hive and without any winter stores, Fryer says the insects will possibly not have time to build up any honey and likely die from starvation or the inevitable infestation of the Varroa mite.

“We didn’t see obvious mites but every hive has different levels of Varroa and if left untreated, the hive will probably succumb by springtime, which is sad that the mite is what might kill them in the end – not what we want as bees are pretty important in the food supply and eco-system,” he says. “Very disappointing they’ve gone, thought that hive was a keeper, but you win some, you lose some. Funnily enough, a few days after the Kaiwaka bee story was out, got a phone call from a forestry worker in Hikurangi who found a wild hive about the same size. Being told of two massive hives within a week is quite amazing.”

Although the four box-hives would have supplied Davis with ample honey as well as an enjoyable wild presence on his land, the builder is philosophical about the bees flight of freedom, saying simply it’s a case of ‘que sera, sera, whatever will bee will bee… .’

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A careful operation to rehouse the wild hive into protective box-hives was ultimately rejected by the rebel bees who decided the wild is where they prefer to be.

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An estimated swarm of 60,000 took to the skies. PHOTOS/SUPPLIED