ROBBING IS NEAR!

Protect against honey robbers...

I've been seeing yellowjackets at the hummingbird feeders so their brood season must be over and they're turning from protein (meat, pollen, etc.) to sweets (honey, syrup, nectar, fruit, soda, etc.).  

During the yellowjacket brood season, they gather protein to feed their larvae. The larvae reward them with a drop of a sweet substance.  The yellowjackets are addicted to the sweetness and continue to bring food to the larvae to continue to be rewarded.  When there's no longer any brood, the adult yellowjackets seek out sweet stuff  in the environment. What could be better than a hive full of honey?!

A robbing event from other honey bees can be a death sentence for a colony under attack. Once the hive is overpowered, predators like wasps have an easy time of accessing the hive and killing the remaining bees.

In order to recognize a honey bee robbing event, the following link will take you to one of Rusty Burlew's posts on robbing. There you will find suggestions on how to stop a robbing event that's in progress.   https://www.honeybeesuite.com/how-to-stop-robbing/ 

So our colonies are in jeopardy of bees robbing bees, and yellowjackets robbing bees.  While I was in my apiaries the other day, I put in entrance reducers and plugged the upper entrances with vent plugs in all of the hives.  That's my method of assisting the colonies against robbing.  

If anyone has other methods to discourage robbing, please share them here.

Gerard