Hey, has anyone here who lives in an Africanized bee zone had colonies get taken over by AHB's?
I only run five hives, and I've changed queens out at least once per hive in the last year, but currently, at least three of my hives are obviously producing at least partially Africanized offspring. Those are some nasty little buggers. I'm used to working my bees with just a veil, but for these I have had to wear two long sleeve shirts, two pairs of gloves, a veil, jeans, a towel pinned around the shoulders, and plenty of duct tape - and I still get stung a lot.
I figured that I might have lost a queen or two and they had replaced her with a new queen that mated with feral AHB drones, but it's happened so often that I'm wondering if they're being aggressively overtaken, but I wasn't sure if that was possible. If so I have a plan to isolate my good queens and brood chambers behind a queen excluder and use a top entrance.
I get all my queens from out of state and it's getting expensive to change them out so often.