Now THAT sounds like the BBs I know and abhor. I have abandoned vehicles, farm equipment and patches of ground to them. They're fine in the garden as they are vigorous enough to cover a lot of flowers in a day.rkunsaw wrote:I have been stung many times by bumble bees.they will chase you down and unlike honey bees bumble bees can sting many times. Bumblebees will not bother you if you don't bother their nest.With the scarcity of honey bees we really need to keep the bumblebees.
OTOH, it takes very little to get their blood up and I have too many memories of dealing with mean bahstuds to cut them any slack around my buildings.
Some of my memories of them involve one of our hay barns. It had studded walls rather than post & beam construction. Some parts of it were boarded on the inside with tonue & groove lumber with a lot of the knots fallen out after many years of drying. The BBs would nest in those cavities, not a big deal until you started putting hay in the barn. The bales dropping off the conveyor onto the mow floor would cause enough vibration to rouse the bees. If we found the hole we could go in at night and (hastily) nail a board over the hole. We found that an old badminton racquet worked great in an anti-aircraft mode. As there were always several guys working to stack the hay the one with the best aim ran air cover for the rest of us.
Out in the fields they would nest in any wad of hay that was not picked up. The next year you would hit the nests while mowing making for some exciting times. We used to run two tractors when cutting hay, one with the mowing machine and the other following close behind with a hay conditioner (crushes the hay stems to help it dry faster). I was on the conditioner and right tight behind the mower one day when the mower disturbed a nest. They hadn't gotten over the initial upset and I spotted a churning mass of black/yellow hurt in time to roll it into the ground with the rear tractor tire.
So yeah, if you can work aroung them they are tolerable but once you cross their threshold of hate they will pursue you far longer than you can run. I will avoid them if I can but if it gets down to killing bees or getting stung the bees are going to lose the battle.
Unfortunately I have never heard of any way to relocate a nest. Sad as it may be the only recourse for BBs impinging on space we need to occupy seems to be just one step short of global thermonuclear war.