I have a particular fascination with feral honey bee colonies, wherever they may be found; in tree hollows, behind the walls of man-made structures, or in the case of African/ Africanized honey bees simply hanging externally from tree branches.My interest in wild colonies began in South America, where we were studying Africanized bees in the mid-1970’s to determine why they had been so successful since their introduction to Brazil in 1956. Chain saws, axes and hand saws to cut into wild nests; cameras, rulers and weigh scales to record and measure, we carried these tools of feral nest research through the savannas and jungles of French Guiana, Venezuela and Peru,removing and assessing about 40 wild nests. Later, while writing and finishing my doctoral studies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, we took nests out of houses and barns and the occasional tree, partly for study but mostly because, well, it was challenging and just plain fun to explore the world of feral honey bees.We recorded reams of data about nest size, number of bees, amount of brood and stores, age of comb and more from the South American and Kansas feral nests. We then transferred colonies into hive bodies, attaching the comb to frames with strapping tape, and kept the hived colonies for research or gave them to local farmers.
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