Man Finds A Ball Of Honey Bees And Discovers Queen Bee Being Attacked Inside

I’ve never heard or seen honey bees do this before! In this unusual video, Fred Boucher, who raised honey bee queens in his backyard, found a ball of bees under one of his mating nucs (a nuc is a nucleus colony of bees).

The bees were very agitated and he could hear high-pitched squealing coming from within the ball. He had never seen anything like it before and didn’t know what was inside the ball at first, but he suspected it was a queen bee.

Why did the bees attack a queen bee? As Fred explains in the video, each queen bee must hatch its own nucleus colony of bees, where it “rules” over the group. In order to give birth to the bees, she must leave the mating nuc and fly to where there are drones and mate with many of them. She then has to return to her nuc. This is the one and only time the queen leaves her hive. But in the case of this queen, she made a critical survival mistake and returned to the wrong nuc.