Evaluation and euthanization of a dangerous honeybee colony [video] | Hacker News Reader

Evaluation and euthanization of a dangerous honeybee colony [video]

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167 pointsCaliforniaKarl99 comments

Surprised to see this here. I used to work in a bee lab. I understand what kind of aggression he's talking about. I don't have experience with Malipona but dorsata are aggressive like this. That's usual for them. Really difficult to handle.

Sad to see euthanizing the colony. When colony becomes super-aggressive in a neighbourhood, it's a difficult decision to make. One way is to transfer the colony to another location and monitor it's behavior.

He mentions that as an option in the video, which is possible since he is located in the relatively remote areas of northwestern NJ, but you still need almost 2 months to let the hive re-queen, and there's still the possibility of them finding unsuspecting victims (e.g. hunters).

Yeah. In bee keeping it becomes a trade-off I guess.

Generally, bees won't attack someone unless there's unusual activity or disturbance in colony. Or sometimes this kind of aggression is the inherent property of the colony due to their life history and genetics of queen.

Casually I just finish to build my new bee hotel this week (Just a log with some holes of different diameters). There are bees for any type of garden. Even small urban gardens can have it.

Now opened for buzzness and waiting for customers. Any tip to make it more interesting?

You can observe the bees and condition them to come at specific time. E.g put feeder (sugar water on a plate) in morning or evening in some distance from the colony (if the colony is there in the hotel) or put the feeder near the hotel. You could see how accurately bees will make trips to feeder after few trials, observe the dance in front of fellow bees, record the dance in camera.

Further you can try to calculate the distance and direction of feeder from hive using the dance of bee. (there's a simple formula and there's always research going on this.)

His very next video shows a hive behaving normally and the difference is stark [0]. One thing to keep in mind for those conflicted about killing off the colony "just" because it's aggressive: honeybees aren't native to here. They were brought here by humans as domesticated animals. You're not hurting a native species or negatively impacting the local ecology - you're protecting the genetics of a domesticated animal imported for honey production, and preventing harm to others caused by an out of control bee hive. It's not the same as killing wolves because they're aggressive where you're messing with the local ecology - honey bees aren't from the US.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2O15qfA6Eo

That's kind of sad... I'm really into bees and I totally understand the decision of euthanizing the hive but, still...

This is one of the reasons I love melipona so much, stingless bees depending on the species can be as productive as these nasty bees from the video (given eco-restrictions, local market etc). The reason these bees are used is because the market got so used to them over the centuries in Europe and it was built around its production rate of honey but if stingless bees were to have the same incentives they would be as much if not more productive.

I consider these western honey bees to be invasive species and many melipona can't fight them successfully. Besides, of course, the whole ecology reasoning behind it as stingless bees sometimes are the only ones who can polinate local species (at least here in Brazil they are super essential and I am glad their hives are growing in popularity honey-wise).

Poor bees...

Yeah, before seeing the videos I was certain they were carrying some incurable disease like the American foulbrood. I was surprised to see that the reason for euthanizing them was the aggressiveness.

I understand the decision too, you can tell the guy in the video is really torn about this. He's frustrated but it was clearly a hard decision, he kept justifying it to the camera but I think he was really justifying it to himself.

FYI: soapy water kills hornets too - the soap coats their abdomen and they suffocate. After trying to take out a nest and having an unexpected gust of wind blow a can of RAID back in my face I decided to look for non-toxic alternatives to kill off hornets.

A squirt gun filled with a mix of warm water and dawn dish soap works better than RAID ever did, and if you have an old school super soaker you can spray from a heck of a lot farther away.

Does this work for paper wasps as well?

Yup! Now that you mention it, it was actually paper wasps I was trying to kill in the RAID incident. I've used it for both.

I have always been enamored by hive insects like ants and bees. Each individual's understanding, effect, even its optical view of the world is minuscule. The scope and of the individual's existence is so tiny, that the mark it makes on the world is a floating point rounding error.

In spite of that, the collective is enough to dominate a kitchen or farm or jungle many orders of magnitude larger. It knows to attack an intruder. It can give a hairless ape with years of training and three layers of protective equipment a really hard time. Hell, it can make a stir in that apex predator's society by reputation alone.

Maybe I find the magnificent result of their cooperation inspiring in its implications for humanity and the greater galaxy. Maybe I'm just a weird nerd that knows what supervillain theme I would pick if this computer stuff doesn't work out.

How about hives of H20 molecules? Those things can work together to take out many thousands of people!

Somewhere out there is a video of the Super AGI who controls the universe discussing if they should euthanize this universe or not, because humans are too aggressive and don't love mathematics enough to have any future.

-- "What if we dispatch the queens?"

-- "We already did that a couple of centuries ago. Didn't help."

FWIW there are at least a couple of old stories about the world being drowned, in at least one of them it is because of the behavior of the humans. It doesn't however include detergent.

That's explained by the Anthropic Principle. In the universes where the almighty added surfactants, we wouldn't be here talking about it.

shrewd readers will notice that the Dolphins didn't need the boat

For anyone looking for wholesome bee-saving content with a Cajun accent check out JPthebeeman https://www.youtube.com/user/JPthebeeman

Bush Bee Man is great as well https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC0xzN4rrvqvNdZRGFPn-rg

The Bush Bee Man is a true "hacker" too. He's always tinkering with random pieces of junk to make the exact tool he needs for his beekeeping.

This is another miracle of the Youtube algorithm. I was recommended this video 2 days ago after having never watched a single bee-anything related video. And I watched every second of that video with rapt attention.

Only problem is now I'm getting of bunch of beekeeping videos and I still have zero interest in the field.

There are plenty of things I have no interest in doing but have watched hours of great Youtube videos by very dedicated people in the field. The depth of some forms of user generated content is amazing and there's nothing wrong with being a spectator. There's definitely a sea of trash too though.

A couple of my favorites in this line of thought: David Bull of Mokuhankan (Japanese woodblock printing), Leo of Sampson Boat Co (rebuild 110 year old gaff cutter). They are both very knowledgeable in their field and take efforts to produce good content at their own pace as part of a long running objective.

Regarding your point of there being a sea of trash, check out David Bulls video "Its not garbage" where he argues that out of all the garbage in our society, woodblock printing is something special. https://youtu.be/hIL3Xpaoe1o

Thanks for the video. The sea of trash I was thinking of is still trash by this definition. Youtube is full of videos that are just some other clip copied with an automated intro and other such things. The algorithm does ok at filtering it out but it's only helping you navigate the sea, you still hit a few of those often enough to be noticeable.

Cody's Lab has lots of other content to but he used to post bee keeping videos. I found it interesting just from the standpoint of seeing how its done. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdItRBzixf0

After watching this aggressive hive linked in the video above though I think I will leave this hobby to others to partake in.

As he says, behavior like this, in his part of the world, is highly unusual. I've never seen anything like it. I'm glad he takes the time to show what a typical hive is like (at the 20:00 mark in the original video). Beekeeping is generally a very relaxing activity for both bees and beekeeper.

I think we got nerd sniped. The algorithm worked.

However I'm curious about how someone could write their own customized recommendation engine, if the Youtube APIs even support that. One thing on my to-play-with list is http://invidio.us, code at https://github.com/omarroth/invidious, which would be a nice starting point.

You basically need the visit and like graphs (which videos were liked/watched by what users), and I don't think the YouTube API will give you that.

If you had those, a good place to start would be the alternating least squares algorithm.

The visit/like graphs are "one-class", which means you don't know if user x hasn't watched video y because x disliked it or just didn't know of its existence. That makes it harder to apply ALS, but it can be done, e.g. http://www.rongpan.net/publications/pan-oneclasscf.pdf

Same here. Presumably this is why it's on HN all of a sudden too. The YouTube algorithm works in mysterious ways.

you click on the three dots on some of the recommended videos and choose "Not Interested" in case you want to stop the recommendations.

I keep trying this with Jordan Peterson videos, but somehow YT thinks I still want to see them.

Eventually it'll work. I managed to get rid of Jordan Peterson this way.

I had this weird video recommended to me of some Norwegian lady interviewing some guy who is a psychic medium. The whole channel reeked of woo.

Haven't seen any more since I hit "Not Interested"

I am not quite sure the difference between "not interested" and "don't show me this channel" option? Does the first affect the recommendation engine, and the 2nd only blacklists a specific channel from being shown to you?

Also, I don't know about anyone else with the same preferences/obssessiveness (I admit it's a bit futile in the bigger picture), but I've tried to give Youtube very strong/steady feedback about the videos it suggests to me (mostly in the negative direction), and it seems I've almost painted myself into a corner with being shown the same videos every day on the YT front page.

I have no idea how long the feedback to their recommendation engine lasts or whether it tails off with time, etc... Or whether it's really worth me continuing to do so vs. opening videos in incognito mode, etc. is more effective.

It was on Reddit at around the same time: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/he2za9/beekeeper_ma...

As did I. Up until now, I had watched maybe two videos about beekeeping in the past 6 years.

I wonder if we’re all are “binned” into some YouTube nerd classification.

I think the YouTube AI decided to save us all by making us all care about bees because we're about to annihilate ourselves because everyone is apathetic currently.

Good Guy Goog

Click the "..." next to one of the bad recommendations. Click "Not interested." Click "Tell us why." Tick "I'm not interested in recommendations based on [whatever bee keeping video is cited here]." Click "Submit." Repeat if you keep getting bee keeping videos. Shouldn't take too many repeats of this process to stop seeing such videos.

I've used this method in the past but it never worked for me. case in point: try to watch a single Joe Rogan and then try to get rid of the recommendations with this. nearly impossible. maybe certain topics are easier?

I've never had a problem with it tbh. But ymmv of course.

I've had success with just removing the video from my watch history.

I sometimes use ‘private’/‘incognito’ tabs or NewPipe on Android to watch one-off vids that I otherwise don't want in my feed.

But also, since the same vid popped up for me as well in the past days, and it's not the first such occurrence—I feel that it might be a not-entirely-organic phenomenon.

Delete it from your viewing history.

Same for me as well

Worst thing I ever did on youtube was watch a video review of a drone (remote control flying toy). Suddenly my youtube home is flooded with drone videos, half the ads are for drones, and outside of youtube I’m suddenly seeing drone ads all over the place.

I watched another youtube video of a couple indigenous guys building a pool, and suddenly my wife (who watched the video with me but who does not use the same device as me) starts seeing similiar videos in in her youtube home.

What does that have to do with this video?

He’s getting bee videos.

You can open a private browsing tab to avoid this. I do that a lot with music videos so I can keep the recommendations to interesting content.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6342839

Watch history and search history

Remove individual videos from your watch history: If you see recommendations on a subject you're not interested in, removing a video you previously watched on that topic may reduce the chance that you’ll see similar recommendations in the future.

Remove individual queries from your search history: If you see recommendations on a subject you're not interested in, removing a search query you previously entered on that topic may reduce the chance that you’ll see similar recommendations in the future.

I'm guessing you're going to start getting a lot of drone videos after watching this one, too...

That transition around 20 minutes to a normal beehive was amazing, even though I have experience hanging around bees.

That's funny, I just saw this suggested to me too, but I'm a beekeeper, so I wasn't expecting this to appear here.

Not a beekeeper. Got it suggested yesterday.

Not that it wasn't interesting. But I wonder how we landed in the situation where one company can cause entire world to watch same things at the same time.

Like NBC Nightly News? When I was a kid, there were ~3 major national newscasts from which to choose and no internet.

Question -- why go through that much trouble to euthanize the hive? Why not just get a huge trash bag, bag up the entire colony, and then pump CO2 into it?

That's an interesting question. I'm not sure how you would pump CO2 into a bag and kill a colony. I'm not sure it's an accepted process for doing that. Maybe there's a chance you might accidentally euthanise yourself.

I imagine at the start of the process, he was hoping to just kill the queen, and the entire colony would survive. In that case the other bees would replace the queen, with an emergency queen cell, if this was to happen the queen would probably be as aggressive as the previous generation.

But he mentions that he intends on introducing a queen himself. In which case, I would have thought the colony would calm down.

But I have no idea how much by, because I've never been in this situation.

Put a big trash bag over the entire box, tie it up at the bottom, punch a small hole and put a hose from a cheap CO2 tank, ozone generator (also cheap), car exhaust, what have you?

If they were aggressive invasive bees wouldn't it make more sense to just kill all of them rather than replace the queen? Those aren't the sort of bees we want flying around our neighborhoods.

His method probably released hundreds of aggressive bees into the air everywhere , whereas if you bag it up they can't go anywhere.

Well, as he says in his video, it's typically the queen that dictates how aggressive the colony is.

Watching the video, he taped the hive up and then poured the soapy water in. I doubt that many were able to get away at all.

Those that were out foraging, would probably die pretty quickly without a hive to go back to.

Yes, the queen dictates the mood of the hive but it happens in 2 ways- her genetics, and her pheromones. It can take over a month before the mood of the hive would change after a re-queening. Even with a queen replacement, there are thousands of these aggressive bees already in there. With nearby kids and horses, and the incredible behavior of this hive, I don't blame him for deciding that the responsible step is euthanizing the whole colony.

He mentions that that is another way to do it, the problem is you use dry ice to generate the CO2 and he doesn't know where to find that. I imagine that this process is not very simple; of course the dry ice goes on top and the cool carbon dioxide falls, but making sure that it pools and collects and fills the hive requires enclosing the hive from the bottom up which sounds nontrivial when it is that swarmy. I think the bottom is enclosed so one would get those huge things of plastic wrap and wrap around the sides over and over? Similar idea though. And then you would just need to know how long to wait for them to suffocate.

it didn't look like he went through very much effort at all to euthanize with Ajax though.

Some hives have enclosed floors. But modern hives, at least in the UK, now have a mesh floor. Which is there to reduce the numbers of a parasite, varroa. The mesh allows the parasite to fall out of the hive.

It's been a couple years since I kept bees, but it's the same in the US: a mesh floor the better to shed the mites.

Another way to do it is to seal up hive and put gasoline in it (the fumes kill the bees). I've seen this done with a hive that had AFB.

In the video, the beekeeper says that the bees are acting very aggressively. As a layman, I can not tell the difference based on what I'm seeing. Would you please describe how these bees are acting visibly different from a 'normal' hive?

What did you think about his decision to first try to replace the queen, but ultimately destroy the colony?

Jump to this timestamp in the video: https://youtu.be/O4ldpyIE5t4?t=1196

He shows you what a normal hive looks like.

Well the video at 3 minutes in, with the Bees flying all over the camera and attempting to sting him. You can see them flying towards the chap, and you can tell when they're doing that that, there's some intent that they want to sting you. I've noticed that they like to go for the face. Probably something to do with the chaps breath.

I went on a year long bee keeping course and I've had my hives just for this season. The hives that I have...I thought were much more aggressive than the hive I looked after on my course, But they're no where near as aggressive as those bees. I had a short period of them being more aggressive, and I think that was due to them taking nectar from oil seed rape (A variety of canola) or the sugared water that I was giving them. They've much calmed down now.

Compared with when the guy is meters away from the problem hive, with mine when I've cracked the hive open, doing an inspection, and I'm accidentally squishing them all over the place. I have a few trying to sting me, but not in the numbers that he's seeing.

I'm actually working about 10 meters away from my hive, in my garden now, and I'm not seeing any bees at all.

The only bit of wisdom that I could add to this discussion is that, on my course, I was told that the more genetic variation the bees have the more aggressive they are. If you import a queen from Italy, from an Italian variety, for the first year they'll be calm, but when you get subsequent generations of queens from that Italian queen they get more aggressive. I guess hybrid vigour makes them aggressive. I suppose especially so with hybrid varieties from Africa (Africanised), but I've not heard much about them in my local area.

As I understand it, they instinctively go for the head and eyes of predators.

This is definitely an immensely aggressive hive. In my limited experience, even the ones I've seen opened up and worked on were not as bad as this.

Thank you for telling us about your experiences.

Check out the very next video on his channel to see what a hive normally behaves like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2O15qfA6Eo

Autor claims "soap" is not toxic. Real soap is not really toxic, but what he is using is dishwashing detergent, which is usually notably toxic and not biodegradable. I wouldn't pour a bottle of it my back yard. Also, it typically coats greasy surfaces, and probably waxes as well. It makes it easier to wash off grease, but if you don't/can't, the detergent stays there.

Wearing 3 layers of clothes and still getting stung. I can't even imagine trying to stay calm, even with the thought of protective clothing

That was one of the interesting parts to me, how he kept consciously reminding himself he was safe (even though literally under attack) and then leaving the area to make an important decision so as not to be making it under the stress of the moment.

Another very interesting YouTube channel dealing with bees, wasps, and hornets is:

https://www.youtube.com/user/628DirtRooster

He removes pest bee colonies from homes and businesses, saving them and relocating them whenever possible.

That is such a great channel. His talk-me-through style enabled me to catch my first swarm.

Very cool!

Why is it called euthanasia, when the bees cannot give consent? Isn't this just "Killing a dangerous hive"? I get it sounds less nice, but saying "euthanizing" is just deceitful language. Words have meaning.

Gaining consent is voluntary euthanasia. You can have non-voluntary euthanasia. However, you are correct that this isn’t euthanasia but for a different reason - you euthanise something to put it out of unbearable suffering.

This is extermination, not euthanasia.

It's pretty common to refer to destroying an aggressive dog, for example, as euthanasia. This is an analogous situation, particularly given that, as pointed out elsewhere, honeybees are domesticated animals. I think this could fall under euthanasia for behavioral problems.

I think that's a mistake in terminology. The dog is not suffering, others are suffering. Normally when I hear reports of dogs being killed due to aggression, the word I hear is "killed" or "destroyed".

I think it does actually matter. Killing because of aggressive behaviour is execution, not euthanasia.

"Euthanasia" just means "good death". And in common usage it means killing something not as punishment or to serve your own interests in some way but for the "greater good"; so executions aren't euthanasia, slaughtering animals to process their bodies or as by-kill in pursuit of some other aim is not euthanasia, and killing for sport or amusement is not euthanasia. Basically, it's killing with regret and respect for the being killed and without selfish intent.

So "euthanasia" doesn't mean what you suggest it means.

Funny, I just read Robbing The Bees which was a pretty good account of the practice and history of beekeeping, but lost me in its final chapter which listed bonkers alternative medicine based on honey and wax.

YouTube recommended me this video last night. Nothing I usually watch has anything to do with the subject of this video, so it was an odd recommendation. Strange to see it here on HN too.

I'm seeing this throughout the thread, and also in the youtube comments.

I wonder, do the youtube recommendations 'discover' that a video is going to be a hit, and then share it with tons of users regardless of their watch history?

That's how I imagine what normal beekeeping is like.

How did he put bees back into the hive? Looking at the attack it was not looking like they would go back by themselves.

What I gathered from the video is that he taped the entrances shut at night when most of the bees were inside the hive. Any bees that happened to be outside of the hive when he euthanized it would die eventually from hunger since they didn't have access to a hive anymore.

Bees return to the hive for the night. He sealed the entrance in the late evening (the few bees you see outside afterwards are those who had not made it home at that point).

I like the YouTube auto-caption: [Music]

Oh wow. Wowowow. This actually worked:

Open the developer console and paste this in:

  var context = new AudioContext();
  var videos = document.getElementsByTagName("video");
  var audioElement = context.createMediaElementSource(videos[0]);
  context.destination.channelCount = 1;
  audioElement.connect(context.destination);

The audio will now be in both channels.

From: https://mikedombrowski.com/2019/03/fix-youtube-mono-one-ear-...

Hmm, not sure what issue you were having. I already hear the audio in both channels without that script.

I had the same issue. Do you actually get stereo output on your device e.g. with this test video [1]?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TWJaFD6R2s

The first ~2-3 minutes only have audio in one channel

Oh. My ears weren't going to wait to find out. (I needed to raise the one remaining channel to an uncomfortable level to hear properly.)

Thank you, that is handy, the audio in one channel happens often enough that it's nice to have a fix.

Cool snippet, I had the same problem and this fixed it

I was also facing this issue but I think it was just the early parts of the video. The sound was stereo again after the first clip change.

I wonder what will happen if you use one of those electric fly swatters.

Euthanizing of Dangerous Bee Hive (2020)

Euthanizing of Dangerous Human Hive (2120)

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