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Running Behaviour in Honey bee colonies
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Bees that run about on frame topbars, when a hive is opened,
are difficult to manipulate without trapping a scurrying bee and
subsequently being stung. If hands are gloved then such a sting may
or may not be felt by the beekeeper, but a sting lodged in a glove
will emit the sting pheromone and consequently the rest of the bees
will be aroused and attentive, even if not stinging en mass.
The behaviour that we are looking for should more accurately
be described as "non running", in other words calm and sedate progress
without paying any attention to what the beekeeper is doing. By this
I mean carrying on as if nothing at all had happened not even standing
still and looking upward, just going about whatever business the
individual bee had in mind before the hive was disturbed by the
beekeeper opening it.
This behaviour applies equally to queens and worker bees...
Drones may or may not exhibit the behaviour, but natural drone
drifting may result in the drone population of the hive being mixture
of types and thus more mobile, so that an few odd running drones may
be ignored for our assessment purposes.
Virgin queens may run about more than mated or mature ones.
We usually score this activity for recording on a scale of
0 - 10, 10 representing total dissinterest by the bees and zero
equating to running around "like headless chickens" (if such a
metaphore is permissible when describing bees).
Intermediate values between 0 and 10 are more difficult to
define and are obviously very subjective, providing that your
judgment is consistant and in some way graded that should suffice. I
should say that in the last twenty five years or so I have only seen
a few dozen colonies that I would score as "10"s and I have never seen
a colony that deserved a zero score.
Written... 06 December 2001
Revised... 07 December 2001
