Silent Robbing and Survival

Introduction

We’ve had nearly a week of bright, clear, still and sunny days when it feels quite hot in direct sunshine but the ambient temperature was only around 12°C. The bees are still on Himalayan balsam and ivy and the leatherwood tree is still flowering and giving off a delicate perfume. Red admiral butterflies seem to like this tree and I see several foraging and resting with open wings to absorb more of the sun’s warmth.

Thank you to everyone who has generously contributed to the site upkeep and maintenance. Your support is greatly appreciated.

Have you had a silent robbing situation this season, or ever? This week, I discovered one and I’m going to share the story with you later on in this blog.
Do you keep track of honey long each of your colonies lives for? I don’t mean how long each queen lasts, but the length of occupation of each hive you manage. In other words, when a colony completely dies out occupation ends there. I haven’t had too many colonies dying out over the years but then I have tended to manage each one and manipulate it such that it can probably keep going longer because of, say, changing a queen and introducing a new one rather than leaving a colony to supersede at the end of summer when mating conditions are tenuous.

Colony Longevity

My deliberate strategy of working more in harmony with the bees and letting them sort themselves out more than I interfere with them is interesting and thought provoking.  It leads to more literature searches like my recent one to find out the latest information about bees living in the wild. For example, how long does a free-living colony tends to live for in the wild. My own limited experience of tracking and monitoring a free-living colony in a larch tree tells me that the colony I found in 2019 lived for at least seven years. The nest was unoccupied this spring (2026) but recolonised again in July with a defensive colony that was busy bringing in pollen and nectar when I last saw it in September. Good news—a strong defensive colony. I didn’t hang about to take too many photos!

There has been some work done already on the longevity of wild colonies in the US, Europe and the UK and for established colonies survival is higher than it is from newly established swarm colonies. Professor Seeley’s work in the Arnot Forest demonstrated a 23% survival rate for newly established colonies compared with 84% for established ones. It seems that between 5-7 years is about the average lifespan of an established colony in the wild.

Visick & Ratnieks Study

I’m slightly veering off topic but I have really enjoyed reading the recent paper documenting the findings of Visick and Ratnieks¹ in southeast England where they studied 63 colonies over six landed estates, including one that was focussed on rewilding. Interestingly, these colonies are not protected in any way by legislation but they are rather remarkable and are a useful genetic resource for our country because they are not believed to have originated as swarms from managed colonies.

The study was mainly assessing the density of wild colonies and it lasted for 3.5 years. The colonies were visited three times a year; March/April, mid-July/August then again in October. If pollen was seen going in then this was a positive sign of nest occupation. One of the key features of success of such colonies was the availability of good nest sites in the cavities created in the middle of veteran trees like old oaks which are plentiful on these large estates. It turns out that there are about 2.5 wild colonies/km² and they generally have access to better forage than colonies in the middle of German forests might have.

Robbing

Back to Hive Six and silent robbing. I had a blatantly obvious robbing event of a small nuc with a virgin queen a few years ago. It was my fault for I spilled syrup on the ground and failed to feed in late evening due to just wanting to get on with the job (two things one should avoid doing). An hour or so later I could hear the angry sounds of robbing.  Bees were grappling with each other at the hive entrance and there would have been complete carnage had I not just shut up the entrance and gone straight into town and placed the nuc in my bee buddy’s garden. I knew Cynthia would be fine with that as we have a reciprocal agreement and plan for such events. I opened the entrance on arrival and out flew a trail of angry robber bees off into the distance leaving the nuc bees to lick their wounds and clean up the honey. On that occasion I was lucky and the queen got mated and the colony survived.

Alan Baxter shared his video of a dramatic robbing situation in one of his apiaries and this gives you an idea of the excitement and noise it generates. Thank you, Alan. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/an0ESEDVBNk

Silent Robbing

 
This time I didn’t notice the robbing because the bees that were entering Hive Six looked like they lived there at the start of October. They weren’t furtive or flying in zig-zag fashion, rather they were confidently entering like it was their own home. There was no resistance from guard bees at the entrance. That I didn’t see pollen going in didn’t alarm me as the BroodMinder temperature sensor indicated that the queen might have reduced egg laying on 15^th September, same as two of the other colonies. I did see a wasp come out through the new Hive Gates and I was suspicious then and figured that the colony must be pretty weak for that to happen. What really made me take a closer look was seeing what I thought was diarrhoea at the entrance but that turned out to be tiny bits of wax that had got wet in recent rain. Robbing bees tear off cell caps in a feeding frenzy and you often see wax cappings on the floor. I hadn’t noticed anything unusual during my daily varroa counts. However, when the brood nest temperature read 10° C that was it; I was going in. My plan had been to transfer the bees into a nuc box for winter. But there was no need because there were no Hive Six bees alive in the hive. A few, including mostly drones, were dead on the floor. There were some frames with dead chilled brood but no sign of any other problem. As soon as I had removed the hive, not a returning bee was to be seen on the hive site but there was a lot of activity next door at Hive Five’s entrance.  This told me that the colony had been dead for a least a  few days.

Hive Six History.

Hive Six started off with me in 2020 so it was over six years old as the previous owner had had them for a few years before he left the country for Spain. At the time, I was curious to see what Buckfast bees would be like. After a year, I knew that I wanted to keep bees that didn’t have massive brood nests and that I wanted to keep darker bees with more Amm genetics so I requeened Six with one of my best queens.
It did well and kept varroa levels low and below the treatment thresholds till the colony death. The last varroa treatment was oxalic acid sublimation winter 2024/25 and the queen was raised in 2024. The colony was strong in 2025 and produced 76lbs honey over and above its shallow box of winter stores. However, the strange thing was it didn’t swarm last year, or this one which made me suspicious. I have never before had a colony that didn’t make swarm preparations. Admittedly, late June this season I took three frames of brood and eggs to supplement other colonies so perhaps this pushed them over the edge. I was certainly interfering, but a couple of colonies had long brood breaks due to poor queen mating weather and I was between a rock and a hard place and needed to give test frames from my best colonies. When you reduce your apiary down to five colonies, it gets harder to manage some situations when you have fewer resources to choose from.

For a few weeks in July, the colony showed signs of chronic bee paralysis virus (CBPV) and chalkbrood, but these appeared to clear up and I let the bees take their chance. I was expecting them to supersede the queen and maybe they tried and just didn’t get another mated queen in time. Whatever happened they are out of my apiary and silent robbing probably finished them off.
Rather than beating myself up over choices made this season, I am encouraged by the conclusion to the Visick and Ratniek’s paper. “We propose that beekeepers can help local honey bee populations by increasing the role of natural selection in their apiaries. In return, they will benefit from greater availability of adaptive traits for their colonies, which should decrease the number of interventions required to achieve acceptable survival rates over time.”

Footnote.

If my income depended upon successful beekeeping, I would run many more colonies and concentrate on honey production and managing colonies by manipulating them to achieve this. I enjoy the luxury of being free to experiment and share my experiences with interested beekeepers. I keep an open mind and would never suggest that the way I do things is any better, or worse, than how others work bees. It is really important for beekeepers to learn that there are many ways to keep bees successfully and to go with what suits their situation best.

Reference:

Visick, O.D., Ratnieks, F.L.W. Density and survival of wild honey bee colonies in English wood pasture, parkland and deer parks. Apidologie 57, 5 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13592-025-01234-4