[ken miller]

In Arizona we have a lot of experience with Africanized bees for the past ~15 years. The typical behavior is that they are easy to manage when their population is small. When their population gets large, they get brave and behavior becomes unpredictable. Work them one day and they are fine. Work them the next week and they may sting everything in sight.

While I was managing a 750 colony commercial operation, by brother got 2 feral swarms in empty equipment. Something set them off one day, we don’t know what it was, and they stung his three horses to death. One horse lived for a week and vet bills exceeded $5000.

The liability of running Africanized bees must be considered. Getting yourself, neighbor, or pets stung does not have a good cost to benefit profile.

[ken miller]

The larva seen in the picture is wax moth larva (lesser wax moth). The webbing is made by the larve as the eat the cocoons of the bees previously hatched out. The black specks are larva feces.

If the feral bees you hived made some new comb which have the spotty brood pattern in the picture above, then they had a queen when you hived them. So, either the queen died or they swarmed. It is possible that they were Africanized…Africanized bees have a high swarm tendency.

Recommend checking a recently hived swarm after 1 week. Upon close inspection you will be able to see eggs layed in the bottom of the cells.. they look like a tiny piece of straw about 1/32-inch long. If you have no eggs and no bee larva aged less than 72 hours after hatch out, the bees will not be able to make a queen (hopelessly queenless). You could combine these queenless bees with another hive. There are several methods of doing this.

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