5 steps to manipulate successfully with
African bees
African bees are known for their aggressive
and defensive characters which make most beekeepers fear and hate them. Of
honey they produce is for their babies and food during scarcity yet human being
go in to grab it! Fortunately these
creatures were endowed with bullets (stings) which they use to defend their
treasures.
Well, African bees are calm and can be
manipulated successfully when you follow the following steps.
1.
Smoke yourself
Bees use their antennas to sense and detect everything including their
enemies. And bees have the ability of detecting moisture on human body in form
of sweat, and eyes drops. Therefore to obstruct bees from feeling our
smell/odour and moisture from our bodies, we shouldn't use perfumes while going
in bees, shouldn't be sweaty because bees will detect you easily.
When you are ready to work with bees, after lighting your smoker, smoke
your whole body with a lot of smoke to cover yourself with smoke than perfume
and odour.
2.
Smoke after dressing
After the first step up of smoking yourself, now you can dress your
beesuit or jacket and smoke it as you did before dressing. This gives double
protection and the bees can't easily detect you even when you don't puff smoke
on yourself next time as you manipulate.
3. Carry the hive
When you approach the hive, smoke around the entrance as usual and cover
the entrances. Now carry the hive from it's original location into a new
convenient location where there is a good shade and a hide away from the
original hive location. Please make sure you replace the old location where you
get the hive from which an empty hive box to catch and collect bees that come
back from foraging and the bees that fly from the hive you are manipulating for
a temporary period of time. After working with the hive, it will be carried
back to its original location and smoke bees that have collected in the
temporary hive to fly back into their original hive.
4. Smoke the hive
Smoke calmly on the bees and do allow them to escape and settle and one
point normally on one end.
5.
Work gently
Gentleness is very important while working with African bees because
African bees are very sensitive to noise, therefore too much hitting on the
hive body should be avoid. When working with bees, you should show a highest
degree of calmness. Normally when you approach and smoke at the bees for the
first time, bees tend to buzz heavy which sometimes force beekeepers to hit the
hive in hurry and fear of bees but when you smoke at them and they buzz
heavily, please slow down the rate of puffing until they also cool down.
When you follow the steps mentioned about, you will never have trouble
working with African bees and this is the practice that we use to make bees
become flies…..and we work with light jackets and sometimes without any
protective clothes but with smoke.
But
African bees are very aggressive and they have ever killed goats and cows and
human beings. therefore we can't rule this out.
