Big Black

Not an entry about Steve Albini's 80's noise metal band -although they're definitely worth a listen. This one's about a big black Queen.

The swarm I collected last month seem to be Black Bees (Apis mellifera mellifera) rather than Buckfast or descendants of Buckfasts. The rule of thumb way to recognise a black bee is, somewhat unsurprisingly, by it's colour -black or very dark brown. They do have browny orange fur but there should be no orangey brown sections of abdomen. There's also various measurements of body parts size, hair length etc to be taken into account if you want to be certain. There's a comprehensive article on how to identify black bees here.

I managed to locate the Queen and mark her with green paint (for 2014). She looks long and thin in comparison to the Queens in my other hives although part of that could be to do with having been slimmed down prior to swarming.

Black Queen with attendant worker, notice the black abdomen on both

You can see her slender abdomen shape

After I collected this swarm and along with another colony I'd made I found myself with 5 colonies which is realistically too many for my garden so I had to unite some colonies to get myself back down to three. I had to unite the swarm of black bees with Hive3 which contained the swarm I'd caught last year, I suspect they were probably Buckfasts originally. Black Bees have a reputation for not accepting other bees amongst their numbers and I can honestly say that at present this mixed race colony is seriously bad tempered. Whilst they were in the 6 frame nuc they were actually very placid but now they're sharing a hive with the Buckfasts the colony is very aggressive during inspections and I've had to walk away a few times already. On the first inspection after uniting them they put a good 6 stings into the wrist of my jacket within a few seconds of opening the hive. I had removed the Buckfast Queen from the other bees before uniting and I'm currently hoping that with time as the Buckfast workers die back they'll be replaced by Black Bees and the colony will revert to it's previously placid temprament. I united them on 3rd July and both sets of bee had eggs. With 3 weeks to emerge and a summer bee lifespan of 6 weeks I'm looking at early September by the time that happens. There was actually a break in egg laying after uniting to colonies but someone in there is laying a lot of eggs again so I'm hoping the original mated black Queen is still in there so I can see how they are to work with in comparison to my other colonies.