A swarm in May is worth a load of hay, a swarm in June a silver spoon, a swarm in July, let it fly! There’s so much truth to the old sayings. Swarming is a perfectly fine, totally normal thing for bees to do. It is also a perfectly annoying thing to see happening in your yard, though it is fun to watch.
A hive of bees is a superorganism, and to reproduce, it has evolved a method for both increasing its numbers and maintaining its genetics. At some point, a colony will decide it is time for its old queen to leave and for them to rear a new one. What the old queen leaves behind is her daughter, a younger and more vibrant version of herself, raised on outrageous amounts of royal jelly, perfectly mated to any number of young and vigorous drones, in a colony staffed by workers anxious to begin rearing astounding numbers of young bees.
Mostly it works out like that, but often enough the young queen has a tough time returning from her mating flight, the weather has put the brakes on pollen and nectar production, the staff is stretched to its limits trying to feed their new nest mates, and the new colony gets off to a slow start. If it falters entirely, the hive will eventually die off. Meanwhile, the swarm is off on a journey to a new home, never to look back – usually anyway.
May swarms, the kind worth a load of hay, typically, contain the old queen and will be replicas of the original colony, at least until the old queen is replaced by one of her daughters. Tom Seeley’s book, ‘Honeybee Democracy’, takes us through the extraordinary process of colony division. A hole in a tree of just the right size will do for their new home, but a box hung in a tree, of just the right size and stocked with frames that telegraph ‘bees were here!!’ will do in a pinch.
If you leave used bee equipment outside, be prepared for a swarm to just move in. Or, if the swarm opts to bivouac where you can easily get to it, not in a tree, it can be lured into a box set near it by tapping rhythmically. And most amazing of all, a swarm can be driven into a hive by beating on pans. Once the queen has moved into her new digs, the bees will settle in and start to work. Except when, for whatever bee reason, things aren’t quite right, and then the whole gang will pour out of the box and take off again.
June swarms, the kind worth a silver spoon, are often headed by a virgin queen. Bees seldom make just a couple of queen cells to restart the colony, but often as many as a dozen. New queens will hatch out over the course of a couple of days, sometimes duking it out to determine who will head the colony, sometimes swarming themselves. It is not at all unusual to find more than one queen in a swarm. Needless to say, this type of swarm has serious leadership issues, and may not make it.
Once we catch a May swarm, we take it home to the apiary or relocate it within the apiary if it has chosen to live with us, let it settle down for a few hours, allow the workers to get out and get their bearings, then the following day install it in a nuc box, two stories high to give the bees space. We feed the swarm sugar syrup and a chunk of pollen supplement to help them get a jump on brood rearing, and if we happen to find her easily, paint the queen with last year’s color, assuming that she is only a year old.
We used to view swarms as free bees, but of late we value them immensely as the foundation of our breeding program. That is to say, rather than buying queens from other beekeepers in far-away places, we rear our own queens from the swarms we catch in our own neck of the woods. Literally. The premise is that bee colonies in the woods have been there a long time, so they are tough, well-ordered, very healthy, with a nice diversity of genetics.
Genetic diversity can be compared to having a wide variety of job skills, which makes you adaptable and highly prized in the workplace. There is a genetic predisposition, beyond the natural tendency, to swarming in some bees, we are told, but we choose to believe that ours are the inevitable products of huge colonies, not eccentric and contrary lines of bees. A vigilant beekeeper will know how to manage the colony’s spring buildup to minimize the swarming impulse by giving the hive more space to grow and spread out.
We have a list of rules for selecting swarms for rearing new queens, starting with attitude. Some of our feral colonies are the gentlest in the yard, which puts them at the top of the list. Then, the colony needs to be strong and healthy with workers that pour royal jelly into the larvae. Finally, we are on the hunt for the complex of traits that keep varroa mites from infesting the hive. This year we have begun using the pin kill brood test to identify likely hives and will do monthly mite washes to confirm their status.
Finally, swarms are a lot of fun. When a colony leaves its hive, it does so in a rush, pouring out of the entrance. You can hear a swarm coming, roaring like a storm or a train. When the swarm is moving in a huge cloud you can stand safely in their center, tho they might get snarled in your hair. Once a swarm settles, you can watch the bees circulate in and out of the cluster, working to warm or cool themselves. Bees in a swarm aren’t aggressive, so you can carefully pick them up and scoop them into a box.
After they decide to enter a box, they do so in a very orderly fashion, politely walking side by side, not shoving and pushing. Their behavior during swarming is so well organized and carefully orchestrated to make certain the process goes as well as possible so the colony will live on.
Do you have a swarm in your backyard and you are not sure what to do? Contact us at [email protected] and we’ll get it taken care of for you!