Soon after we purchased our first hive and installed (for want of a better word) a family, or colony, of bees, we inherited another colony. The colony's owner discovered he had an allergy to bee venom and didn't take care of the hive's needs as he would like to have done. Over time the colony became used to stillness around its borders and the bees became irritable when approached.
I have no words to describe the fierce activity surrounding me as I prepared the hive to be moved to its new location. Needless to say, the atmosphere was noisy.
For about a week, as I made attempts to visit our numbers 1 and 2 hives, the new family spotted me coming and sent out a posse to head me off. It was frustrating. I eventually kept a water misting bottle with me whenever I was planning to be anywhere close to the hive. That helped, but it wasn't very peaceful.
In a post or two back I gave a link to a book I've thoroughly enjoyed listening to: "Telling the Bees" (go check it out); it was in this book that I learned of a very simple idea to calm down feisty families. My version of the waving rag went something like this:
My wife spotted a design of a lawn flag that she liked, so I picked one up. Later that evening when it got dark I snuck the flag out to the hive and stuck it in the ground about ten feet from the entrance. The idea is that the flag gently flaps in the breeze where the bees can see it. At first the flag was of a concern to the bees, but within a couple of days the bees got used to the activity and all the feisty was gone. Now I visit them and they don't even see me coming; I can stand and enjoy the hive activities without any fear of setting off a revolution. It's great.
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