President’s Ramblings – July 2025
For various reasons I’ve not written anything in the last 6 months.
Some news items this month have caught my eye.
The first article that caught my eye was this report by the BBC from France.
Several dozen people were injured – with three rushed to hospital in a critical condition – in an unusual bee attack in a French town, local authorities said.Twenty-four passersby were hurt when hundreds of bees suddenly attacked people in the central-southern town of Aurillac on Sunday morning. The three in a critical condition are now stable.According to local media, one of them was a 78-year-old woman who was stung 25 times and had to be resuscitated after a cardiorespiratory arrest.
Police and firefighters fenced off the area and a beekeeper was called in to smoke out the bees – a safe way to calm the insects.
A local woman called Andrée said she witnessed “very panicked people” trying to bat off the bees. “I could tell they were being attacked by something but I couldn’t figure out what,” she told French media. The mayor of Aurillac, Pierre Mathonier, was reported as saying that Asian hornets threatening a beehive may have been the catalyst for the attack.
But Christian Carrier, the president of the regional beekeepers’ union, was sceptical. He told France Info that bees generally avoid leaving their colonies altogether in the presence of Asian hornets. Instead, he said that the unusual incident may have been due to the bee colony becoming too large for its beehive and becoming “overactive” when the beekeeper handled it. “It may be that [the bees] didn’t have enough space and that their colony had no intention of swarming. This can trigger strong aggression,” Mr Carrier said.
The mayor’s chief of staff, Vincent Fournier, acknowledged the presence of Asian hornets could be one of the reasons for the bees’ odd behaviour. However, he also said the bees could have been stressed because of a problem with the queen bee, or could have been reacting to external factors such as “heatwaves, early blossoming in May-June and subsequent lack of food in July, or a sharp drop in temperatures”. “The causes of this incident will be analysed,” adding the beehives have now been moved to a location outside the town of Aurillac.
I wonder whether a more plausible reason is just that the colony had become aggressive due to cross breading with imported bees, and then something just triggered the attack. Once stinging takes place other bees will be attracted by the pheromones released and then join in. I’d not heard of a report of a bee attack like this since the early days of Killer bees in America.
The second article was about a beekeeper in Dorset who has caused problems with his neighbours after they claimed his swarms are making their gardens unusable. At one point they even arranged for another local beekeeper to collect a swarm.
Swarms can be frightening to the general public, so we have a responsibility to ensure that we don’t cause problems for our neighbours. It was for this reason that I stopped keeping bees in my own garden. I didn’t get a swarm very often, but even with good swarm control things can go wrong. This news item wasn’t the first time I’d come across beekeepers who didn’t deal with their own swarms. So it’s a warning to all beekeepers not to cause a problem for neighbours.
The third article from the Mail Online was about vandalism. A beekeeper in Dorset had 23 of her 30 hives vandalised. They were in a remote private woodland, 400 yards from the nearest track and two miles from the nearest village. Just days later the 62 year old beekeeper returned to finds the hives had been kicked over again. Mrs Cruttenden said: ‘My hunch is that it’s a fellow beekeeper. It just smacks of jealousy and somebody with a grudge against me.’ ‘The first incident we put down to mindless vandalism. ‘Everything that was on the stands was on the floor. It was in all directions so I know it wasn’t the wind and it wasn’t animals because nothing was chewed.’ She added she was ‘gobsmacked’ by the incidents and said: ‘But if kids had done it I don’t think they would have risked or been bothered to go all the way back to the middle of nowhere to do it again. ‘The area has never been an issue before for bored kids and this is the first time we have had such trouble in 23 years of keeping bees. I believe whoever has done it had a motive for doing so. I just think it is someone with a grudge’.
(As an aside, I would have thought 30 hives on one site is rather too many. I thought 10 was about the limit.)
It would appear that wherever you keep your bees there can be problems.
A word of warning when taking honey off. An acquaintance of mine has kept bees on his allotment in Liverpool for 2 years and never had any honey, until this year. He was over the moon to have a full super on his best hive. He put a clearer board on and went back 2 days later to find the super was empty – robbed out! The lesson to learn from this is to ensure that when you put a clearer board on below a super, make absolutely sure that there is no way that a bee, or a wasp, can find a way into that super. I often used to rely on the roof being bee proof, but found once that the ventilation slots in the roof didn’t have gauze over them!
I’ll be interested to see what the Heather crop is like this year. My guess is that it’s been too dry unless we get some very heavy rain. I believe the best year for heather honey on Exmoor was 1952 (the year of the Lynton and Lydmouth flood disaster). That summer in early August 8 inches of rain fell overnight on the moor.
Happy beekeeping
Geoff Critchley