| HN Mirror

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.