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Comment by arm85 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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