Next level robbing

[u/i_iz_potato]

So I have had something new happen in my beekeeping adventure. 2 days ago I went to give all my hives Hive Alive fondant patties. Ive done this every fall for a couple of years now, never had issues. Bees love it. So this year I opened each hive, put in a patty and closed hive.

Well the next day every hive has tried to rob every other hive. Its a free for all out there and I have never seen anything like it. I have witnessed a hive or 2 in get robbed before but not 10.
I even brought out the water hose to simulate a rain shower and that barely slowed any of them down.

Has anyone ever had this happen? I have no outside feeders, everything is internal. Honey stores should be in a good place for all hives and ive never had Hive Alive set any hives off before.

Western North Carolina.

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[u/Mediocre-Draft1722]

I'm in Virginia and this year bees are more rabid than usual. Dunno if it's the dry weather or what. 

[u/i_iz_potato → u/Mediocre-Draft1722]

I just went back outside, have bees going everywhere. Never seen this type of behavior. But we also have a lot of dry weather and very high temps for october.

[u/Quorate]

Seen it once with 2 wild colonies 50 feet apart. Big cloud of robbers at each. I joked it was a bad neighbourhood where neighbours robbed each other. The next day they were calm.

[u/Late_Gift7266]

I have two hives within 5 feet of each other. South-central Kansas. Last weekend I saw evidence of robbing n one hive, so I shut down the entrance to a sliver and reduced the other one to 1”.

As of yesterday, hive #1 is abandoned, all honey gone. Hive two still has a lot of honey stores but I think my queen was killed because there might be two frames worth of bees left. I’m probably going to be freezing my honey frames for next year at this rate.

[u/cardicorg65]

Lost all my splits this year the moment I added in frame feeders. Putting bucket feeders inside deeps on top produced the same frenzy. Been taking some flack for setting up open feeders to draw the robbers away but it worked and I’m not sorry.