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Faunsdale, AL | It’s a setback, but it’s also normal bee behavior. Some bee keepers set up a “swarm trap” or two in trees near the bee yard to attempt to attract the swarms they miss, but the goal is to keep the bees from ever getting the idea of swarming or beat them to the punch by making “splits” to replace lost colonies.
The number of swarms I see is a small fraction of the number I used to see when there was a large commercial bee operation in our area with bee yards every few miles. They had lots of colonies swarm in spite of their management and every hollow tree or crack in a house soffit had bees in it.
Usually the swarm bees will stay in a hive if they’re shut up inside for a few days. Not always though.
The swarming process is similar to a campaign for election.
In the run up to the actual swarm, the colony will begin rearing drones which the Queen determines by laying an unfertilized egg. When the drone brood is well along and there’s a population of drones building up in the area, the workers then build around a dozen queen cells and the queen lays a fertilized egg in each of them which hatches into a larvae like any other female/worker bee but the the workers tend and feed the ones in the larger queen cells to become queens.
Once the new queens are well along the way to emerging, the worker attendants to the old queen put her on a diet and exercise program so she stops laying eggs and is able to fly out with around half of the worker bees to make a new colony. On the actual day, there’s a great buzz around the hive and the swarm flies out and usually goes only a little way and then sets up temporary residence on a limb or bush, clustered around the Queen to protect her while scouts are out looking for the future colony site, usually a cavity in a tree or building. During this time, the bees are usually not aggressive/protective and can be approached and handled without getting stung…….much! There’s a story in that.
Anyway, scouts come back to the swarm cluster and dance and buzz to tell the rest of the bees where their prospective site is. Other scouts come back and dance (campaign) for the cavity they found. Other bees use the location info from the dance and go and check out each site and eventually a critical mass of the worker bees will “agree” on the “best” site and the swarm flies off to occupy it.
Occasionally the process fails and the swarm stays on the limb or bush and makes exposed combs and the bees stay until cold/wet weather kills them. This bunch of bees is no longer a swarm and will defend their combs/hive if messed with.
The “mother” hive is now down half strength, but with more room and 10-12 potential young healthy queens that will compete/fight to become Queen. It’s primarily a race to emerge from the cocoon first which is a sign of proper development. The first out can go sting all the later/slower developing queens and kill them before they emerge. If multiple queens emerge, a battle to the death ensues and one or both queens can be killed or hurt but there will normally be one live queen in the hive after it’s all done.
However, the new (virgin) queen must fly out and mate with as many as 15-20 drones. She, as a virgin queen, is a stronger flier than drones and almost always flies farther and mates with drones from other hives. So, any hive raising drones is only going to contribute genetics to the drone pool in the area, not to actually raise the drones that will mate with the replacement queen they’re going to be raising soon.
Once she’s mated, the new Queen returns to the hive and may never leave again unless the colony swarms before she dies several years later. She will never mate again and lays fertilized eggs using sperm from the drones she mated with on the one or two mating flights when she was first emerged. If she runs out of sperm, she can only lay unfertilized eggs which develop into drones and the colony will soon crash.
Normally, when she becomes compromised in some way, while she is still laying fertilized eggs, the workers will build queen cells to raise a replacement queen and a “supercedure” occurs. The new Queen and the old queen may actually both be in the hive for a while and co-exist without friction, but the workers will tend the new Queen and the old queen dies.
If you think about it, the whole process of swarming is fraught with possibilities of disaster involving the old and new queen on whose egg laying ability, the existence of each of the colonies depends, not to mention things that can happen to the “daughter” colony when they’re on the move or either colony is in a weakened state as far as numbers goes. More often than not, the original colony “reproduces” itself and two colonies result, but neither are as strong in the short term as the original and can have problems that result in failure before the next spring when it’s easiest for the colony to build up numbers.
Edited by ccjersey 5/31/2023 00:31
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Almost got away
