Robbing

Definition

When forage fails, strong colonies will attack and empty weak ones. Robbing spreads disease efficiently between colonies and can escalate across a whole apiary. It is triggered by exposed honey, weak colonies with large entrances, and inspections during a dearth — which is why beekeepers work quickly and keep supers covered when nothing is flowing.

Where the word gets used loosely

Robbing between colonies is a different thing from nectar robbing, where a bee bites through the base of a flower. The words are the same and the behaviours are unrelated.

Honey records that discuss this

• Field bean honeyMild and clean with a faint green-bean vegetal note under a soft sweetness — pleasant and undemanding rather than distinctive.

Plant records that discuss this

• AlfalfaExcellent forage on paper, and the tripping mechanism complicates it in practice: a honey bee robbing nectar from the side of the flower collects no pollen and delivers none.
• ComfreyExceptional nectar, but genuinely restricted by flower shape — which is why the separate rating for accessibility matters more here than almost anywhere else.
• HoneysuckleHigh nectar, and largely unavailable to bees. The ratings and the accessibility note have to be read together here or the plant looks far better than it is for the insects most people are planting for.
• Field beanGood on both counts, and unusual in offering nectar from two different structures.
• ColumbineA good nectar source that most bees cannot reach legitimately — which is precisely what makes it interesting.

Bee records that discuss this

• Stingless beesThe other honey-making bees, and the only serious rival to Apis for that title. Stingless bees are tropical, perennial and genuinely eusocial, and they store honey in clusters of egg-shaped wax-and-resin pots rather than in hexagonal comb. Their honey is different enough from Apis honey — wetter, more acidic, sharper, prone to fermenting — that several countries have had to write separate standards for it. They have been kept by people in Mesoamerica, Australia, Africa and South-East Asia for thousands of years, in traditions entirely independent of European beekeeping.
• Buff-tailed bumblebeeThe commonest bumblebee in Europe, the one reared commercially by the million for tomato pollination, and — as a consequence of that trade — an invasive species on several continents. It is also the bee behind the winter bumblebees now active through December and January in mild British cities, which is a genuine and recent behavioural change.
• Digger beesFast, furry, bumblebee-like solitary bees that hover in front of a flower before darting into it, and among the earliest substantial bees of the spring. The hairy-footed flower bee is the one most British gardeners meet — the females black and the males gingery, so different that they were long thought to be separate species — and it is a specialist of deep tubular flowers that honey bees cannot use.
• Alfalfa leafcutter beeThe most intensively managed solitary bee in the world, and the animal that makes alfalfa seed production possible. Honey bees learn to rob alfalfa flowers from the side to avoid being struck on the head by the tripping mechanism, which means they gather nectar and pollinate nothing. The alfalfa leafcutter bee tolerates being tripped, and North American seed growers deploy it by the hundreds of millions.
• Alkali beeA ground-nesting American bee managed at a scale nothing else matches: growers in the Walla Walla valley of Washington State build and irrigate artificial salt-crusted nesting beds covering hectares, in which millions of females nest, and then farm alfalfa seed around them. It is the only significant case anywhere of a wild ground-nesting bee being managed by engineering its habitat rather than by housing it.
• Italian honey beeThe most widely kept honey bee subspecies in the world, and the golden-banded bee most people picture when they think of one. Italian bees were exported from the Ligurian valleys from the mid nineteenth century and now underpin commercial beekeeping across the Americas, Australasia and much of Europe — chosen for gentleness, prolific brood rearing and a strong disinclination to swarm.