Yes some are meaner than others. Swarms and cut outs are a good way to get mean bees. I still catch swarms, but I now requeen them with my genetics as soon as practical. My first hive came from a swarm and they were aggressive. I bought some packages of Italian bees (big mistake) that first year too and they were very calm. I could work them without a bee suit or gloves. The Italian packages didn't last long and I bought some nucs from a guy up close to Valley Head. All his bees are descendents of feral bees from a tree cutout he did in 1997. They are highly mite resistant and they are a little meaner (hotter) than straight bred Italians, but they aren't super aggressive.

I have raised many queens from those first Valley Head bees and most are a little hot but not too bad.

I have one hive left that has a daughter queen from that first swarm I got. They are bad news. I can't get within a 100 feet of their hive without my bee jacket and leather gloves on. When I robbed their honey last year, as soon as I popped the top of the hive I had 100 bees on my veil. Within about a minute I probably had 1000 bees on my veil and by the time it was over I had several 1000 bees trying their best to sting me. I decided then that I was going to kill off that hive. I wish I had done it last summer like I intended to do, but I didn't.

I killed that queen about 2 weeks ago, let them get to the point that they had no more eggs or larvae to make queen cells from. I then went in the hive and tore down every queen cell. I shook the bees off every frame to make sure I didn't miss one. I put a mated queen in with them Tuesday and left her in a queen cage for 2 days. I checked yesterday and they had eaten out the candy plug to release her but she was still in the cage. I removed the screen covering and about 30 bees went in with the queen. I couldn't tell if they were trying to kill her but then I saw one try to sting her. I brushed it off her and she went down in between 2 frames.

I am going to check them again first part of the week and if they did kill the queen, I'm going to put an empty deep box on top of the hive, put duct tape across the entrance and fill the empty box with dry ice and kill the hive. I want to kill the hive in a manner that I can reuse the drawn comb. If not for that I'd just pour a bucket of soapy water on them and kill them.

I've read it's hard to get a hot hive to take a new queen, and the only way to do it is to make them hopelessly queenless. I did that by making sure the larvae were too old to make a queen from and by cutting out all the queen cells. I can hardly believe they'd kill their only hope of having a queen but I think they did.