To the untrained eye, these might look like bees but they certainly are not. They are bald-faced hornets and they eat honey bees for breakfast...literally. A huge number of these hornets mounted an attack on my weakest hive. They decimated it in the span of five days, eating all the honey bee eggs, larvae, and many adult bees. They were actually pulling capped larvae out of the cells to feast on them. Despicable!
I took the compromised hive apart (while getting bombarded by angry hornets) and shook off all the invaders. I then took the bees that were left and combined them with another hive placing a newspaper barrier between the hives to allow them to get used to the scent of each other before mixing together. When they were ready to combine, the bees ate away the newspaper layer to allow mixing of the colonies. I reduced the entrances of all of my colonies to make them easier for the bees to guard against future hornet attacks.
The hive I combined with was in the process of requeening. There were three queen cells at the time of the combination. The hive I added had a laying queen but she may have been injured (or suffering from honey bee PTSD) as a result of the hornet attacks. I was not sure whether the hive would choose to keep the queen or to kill her and wait for the queen cells to hatch. It was a wait and see game and still is...
I checked the combined hive a week later and the two colonies had mixed and there were no longer any queen cells but also no eggs or larvae that I could see. I am not sure what is going on. I will wait another week or two to see if they can sort themselves out. If not, I will likely have to purchase a queen to introduce to the hive. It is getting a bit late in the season to have them raise their own from eggs, in my opinion.
Life with bees is always interesting, though I must admit that I am now not a big fan of bald-faced hornets. They can consider themselves unfriended from Gael Glen's Apiary.
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