The Swarming Season

The unmistakable dark smudges denoting 2 swarms high in the trees

One of my great personal delights and fascinations along this journey of natural bee keeping has been to observe the bees in as natural a life cycle as can be possible with the homes we have created for them. Last year was my first using this management system and I had never seen a single swarm from my hives. This year has been very different. Not only have all my hives exceeded the volumes I have witnessed before but I have had 6 swarms take off and land very close to their parent hives. 3 I have managed to house  for the future and 3 are still deciding what to do.

Why do bees swarm?

Every bee within a colony must get a dose of queen scent to maintain the cohesion of the colony. When there are too many bees for this to happen the workers are stimulated to make 'queen' cells on the comb and, although the egg is genetically identical to the worker eggs, the shape of this cell dictates to the workers that this one is special and requires a different food-Royal Jelly. The chemical composition of this jelly is responsible for the development of the larva into a queen.

The swarming of bees is usually discouraged by traditional bee keepers. It is the old queen that takes off taking up to 40% of the colony with her and each one of those worker bees will have filled her stomach with honey in preparation for the journey. As a farmer of honey you would see nearly half your crop just fly away! To combat this, unwanted queen cells are culled to retain the crop in the hive. Resident queens are marked with a coloured marker to identify the year she hatched and she will be allowed to live for a couple of seasons.

Swarm number 3 sitting tight.

I like to think of swarms as the runners of strawberry plants or the conkers of horse chestnuts. They are a natural way to propagate colonies and can be thought of as birthing a new entity into the world. I have people crying out for swarms at the moment but if they remain inaccessible and fly off to make new homes elsewhere then I wish them the best of luck.

A word on lures

In my naivete, and having adopted a non intrusive approach to bee keeping, I had believed that all I would have to do to capture a swarm for my empty hives would be to prime a box with a lure. Lures are cocktails of essential oils deemed to be the closest thing we can come up with to attract honey bees. They come in different forms: either small plastic phials which can be opened in the hive or as wipes which can be wiped over the interior of the hive or punctured and hung from the frames. The hives that I put these in had beeswax on the top bars too so all the ingredients.......not so.  At least 2 swarms must have flown right past these welcoming homes only to settle elsewhere. The instructions suggested they would attract swarms for up to 6 weeks from a radius of 3km. I am a little sceptical about this now.

And the lesson I have learned from this: no pain, no gain.