Very crabby would be a HUGE understatement. They would hunt me down and sting me hundreds of yards from the hives days after I had last worked them. If I approached the hive from the BACK they would pour out of the hive at me. You don't want to even imagine what happened if you opened it. The banana smell would fill the air and they would be all over you, not headbutting but stinging. Four hives (all four hives at the time) went berserk like this simultaneously in August of 2001 in the middle of a drought right after all four swarmed.
This is NOT what the Buckfast bees I had for the previous 27 years were like at all.
