.SWARMS AND
SWARMING
.
The swarming instinct in the honey bee is the
way that it procreates as a hive entity. When a hive gets
overloaded with bees and there is nowhere for the queen to lay or
the queen gets old then the bees decide to split up and a swarm
leaves the hive and with it the old Queen. How they decide who
goes with the Queen is a mystery but there is a mixture of ages
and drones.
Though the swarm may gather a short way from the hive,
they do not tend to hive themselves in the vicinity, they move
some distance away thereby going where they do not overlap too
closely over the old hive bees foraging area. When they swarm
they can land in some convienent place, but other times in an
awkward one. There are ways and means to discourage bees from
swarming and flying away, but if they are adamant then there is
little to be done except to try to catch the swarm and to rehive
it.
Some people advocate the
clipping of the Queens wings to stop them having the ability to
fly, thus preventing a swarm departing with the Queen. If the
Queen does leave the hive then she is usually found on the ground
by the front of the hive with some attendant bees, this then
allows the beekeeper to make some arrangement to sort the
swarming instinct out by rehiving the Queen in a nuc box with
some bees and allowing the swarm to be run into the same box or
reunited with the main hive.
If the hive has swarmed then it will mean there
are sealed Queen cells in it. There is no guarantee that when the
virgin queens leave their cells that a swarm or even some casts
will not still leave the hive, but usually it will return to
normal especially if the beekeeper has done his/her job and cut
the queen cells down to one at the start. One important thing to
remember is that sealed cells mean the virgin queens will emerge
in about 8 days.
Swarm prevention
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