Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum
BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => GENERAL BEEKEEPING - MAIN POSTING FORUM. => Topic started by: BabcockFarms on May 19, 2012, 09:15:44 pm
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I have been seeing several of these black bees around lately. I thought it might be a carpenter bee but from the description here on the forum it sounds like carpenter bees are larger. This is the same size as a honey bee. Does anyone know or have a guess what species this is?
(http://s14.postimage.org/lqgn8yy9p/Black_Bee_Crop.jpg) (http://postimage.org/image/lqgn8yy9p/)
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My guess is it is just a honey bee "mutt". I see them fairly often, particularly when I am removing ferel hives.
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Apis Mellifera Nigra......Irish/European native black bee?..maybeeeeeee let me know if any chance intercepting those bees.
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first swarm i picked up this year had very dark bees and a very dark queen.
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Look and see if the bottom of the abdomen gets covered with pollen. There is I believe a leaf cutter bee that looks like a honeybee except for color until you see where the pollen is stored. At least i see them in the later summer in my flower gardens.
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Looks like a honey bee to me. Carpenter bees are similar to bumbles except they're all black and can be larger depending on species in your area. I feel bad for some of the plants they visit.... Male carpenters can be blonde or all orange and are huge as well.
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http://www.bushfarms.com/images/BlackBees.jpg (http://www.bushfarms.com/images/BlackBees.jpg)
Sometimes they have stripes and sometimes they don't...
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They are all mutts, some just have been selected for color. They are like a red truck, it is red and others are blue. Its works though, people pay big money for a certain color bee. Isn't it pretty, but it is still a bee.
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In my area, there have always been black bees here and there. I've never seen a colony of all-black bees, but my colonies all have some pretty dark individuals. One of my queens (see my pic) is almost solid black.
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Thanks guys for the info.
I am not sure where these black bees are coming from. As a newbee I now have a heightened awareness of the bees that are around our farm. So I can't really say with any certainty if they were here before or after I hived the two packages. What I can say is I have never seen any bees this black in the hives. This doesn't mean there are not there, just that so far I haven't seen any in the hives. I do have up two swarm traps on opposite sides of our property, hoping that I can catch a swarm. These black bees ARE very interesting looking.
Atri - you maybe right with your speculation of being Irish/European native black bee. She did seem to act a bit tipsy. :-D
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I bought a russian queen last year and she had a completely black abdomen and a lot of her offspring are various shades from nearly as yellow/orange as my italian hive to nearly all black like your picture. The drones in the russian hive I have are all black.
I tried to catch a feral hive last summer, but unfortunately didn't get the queen. They were very dark in coloring, the local bee inspector looked at them and said they were german bees.
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Ron, did you catch any swarms in your swarm traps? Any of the black bees?
Kyle
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This is my first bee. Not black but pretty dark. Came packed in a box of wooden ware and survived the trip. :shock:
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Dang, Michael Bush has a lot of black bees. Mystery solved!
Since I started keeping bees, I am more observant of them. For several months I have seen an occasional very small black bee foraging about the ranch. I assumed they were was another species of bee, but then a few weeks back I saw one go into one of my hives. The next time I did an inspection I looked carefully and saw a few of the small black bees. The queen of this hive is a small bee that is mostly black, but she does have some very faint yellow streaking. The genetic makeup of bees is too complicated for this old engineer, but apparently the breeding process of queen bees produces many strange variants.
As the youngsters say, bees are "cool."
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The bee in the flower seems to me like Caucasian bee. At least it is not German Black.
Reason to black abdomen is that it is old and it has lost its hairs.
Here is another old bee without hairs. Robbig bees are aften without hairs.
Caucasian bee in flower according internet http://wadesbees.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/races-of-bees-caucasians/ (http://wadesbees.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/races-of-bees-caucasians/)
(http://wadesbees.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/caucasian-honey-bee1.jpg)
(http://www.tsar-events.com/Sochi/honeybee.jpg)
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German Black bee's form is a little bit round and abdomen tip is round. Mostly hairs are dark brown.
Without hairs the bee is black.
(http://backyardhive.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/aimos-black-bees.jpg)
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Kyle,
Unfortunately I didn't catch any swarms. I did keep seeing the dark bees around but never saw them in my hives.
Maybe next year I can find where they are coming from and see what the ratio is in the hive.