Mugged !

[SDM]

Big time !! I just got home to a horror show. It looked just like a swarm had landed in my yard( I get a few every year into bait hives). So I started to look in all the usual places to find them, O ly to look down the garden and see each of my hives and nucs covered in bees. So entrances down to single file and the crowd quickly dispersed. The damage ? 2 nucs with zero honey ( one that had 2 capped brood frames of heather honey and an extra 2 frames of youngsters brushed into it as a starter colony its got 12 very hungry queen larvae in it now) 2 nucs I shouldn't open as I introduced queens 3 days ago and my savage tiny black colony lost barely anything. 1 hive emptied and 2 more mostly emptied. Every colony hit.
The culprit ? Unfortunately, my mentors bees he has 10 or 15 colonies double the size of my strongest here(my best are up at the heather).and they're just a few hundred metres away.
OK , sob story over.

[SDM]

I spoke too soon, it started to build up again so it was clean bed linen for everyone.
It's a bloody glorious day here, not a breath of wind which, since we haven't had many, makes it all the more frustrating. I can see very few of my bees around 2 of the nucs so I may have lost them completely. It would be the 2 I just bought queens for.
Actually my strongest colony was only 14 frames of bees many of his are 6 or 7 boxes of bees.

[Jon]

Were you feeding syrup? It is rare to get a robbing frenzy starting like that spontaneously.

[SDM]

I fed 3 of them about 5 days ago in the dark. The starter colony and the 2 requeened nucs. The others have been fed heavily throughout the season as they were all this years splits or swarms and on undrawn foundation. The bad news for my mentor is that almost all the stores were thymolated hive alive. So I guess hell smell which ones did it when be pulls his supers.
A couple of taps on the requeened nucs got no response and the single brood hive has lost half its bees(I couldn't look for HRH as it becoming dark) big casualty numbers under all the sheets. They were all on reduced entrances except for the 3.5 frames of nasty black ones who've survived almost unscathed. The hives are now on a single hole of Payne's reducer and the sheets can stay tomorrow at least. I've had robbing start, but nothing like this. They're in my garden , I pass them several times a day, so I'd always noticed before it became a problem, but Saturday was the last night of regattas and I'd stayed at a friend's and not got back till mid afternoon, which gave them 2 days to build up to it.

[SDM]

Both the nu s with new queens are still kicking. One of them bringing in a load of pollen too. So I guess she was alive and laying before the robbing started. Let's hope she's not held responsible for it.
Not an ideal introduction.

[SDM]

2.5 days with sheets over them and there's still robbers around 3 or 4 colonies.
Do I need to move them ?

[Jon]

The internet is awash with advice about how to stop robbing but moving them is almost always the best solution.

[SDM]

It feels a bit back to front, moving my hives off my land so someone else can keep theirs , but in the short term its the solution. It's raining now, but 20 mins ago there were still robbers around 3 of them. I was going to overwinter them elsewhere anyway, but hoped to let the new queens settle before moving them....he, ho.
Frightening casualty count under the sheets. On the strongest of mine , nearly a shopping bag of dead. I don't think any would survive a repeat.

[Jon]

You will be able to move them back in a few weeks. August is often a bad time for robbing as supers have just come off and there is a lot of syrup being fed.

[Adam]

If you close up the hives with the robbers in, and then move them, the robbers stay with the moved hive as they will reorientate to it once opened. Maybe some poetic justice that you might be able to steal some of the thieves!