Jan 2015  – Newbie homesteaders in Florida lost their entire hive to marauder bees.   The home bees attempted to defend themselves, but even adding a reducer at the entrance and covering the hive with a sheet to keep the renegade bees out did not help.  “It only took 24 hours…everything in the hive was gone.”  A neighboring beekeeper suggested that the bees may have destroyed their own hive and left, when they saw that they couldn’t win the fight.   

Where do marauder bees come from?  Bees that run out of pollen sources or have too much honey taken out of the hive, and are not supplemented with sugar water, have to go out raiding other hives.  

There’s not too much information about it on youTube or searching on Google.  I did find this entry in “Routledge’s Cheap Literature”.  It’s a book written by John George Wood, and published in 1862.

Lovely illustrations…

The author’s advice for discouraging the marauders is to make the reducer into a tunnel or tube, in hopes that the villains will not venture in.  We’ll have to try it…but the book is great if you would like to read it on Google eBooks.  Search for ‘marauder bees’…

Anyone have any other advice?

Best,

U.M. Schin