Have you ever wondered why honey bees swarm?
Swarming is a sign of a healthy growing colony of honey bees. They generally swarm in the Chicago area beginning in early May until mid July. A swarm of honey bees may look dangerous but just the opposite is true. They are at their gentlest when swarming and will do everything to avoid stinging you since they will die if they will die if they do. Each bee in a swarm is carrying ½ her body weight in honey from the original hive. She can’t risk hindering the success of the colony by dying and wasting her precious cargo.
Honey bees want to increase their population and swarming is their way of keeping the species alive. A colony that survives the winter and is growing well in spring will feel confident they can support ½ to ⅓ of the colony splitting off and reestablishing elsewhere. This is a tricky maneuver because both the original colony and the swarming colony need to recover and store enough honey to survive the winter. It takes from 60 to 90 pounds of honey for a colony to make it through winter. An individual honey bee will only produce a 12th of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime. That means it is important everything is timed just right for them to be successful.
When honey bees feel the time is perfect, they begin the process by forcing the queen to lay eggs in special queen cups. A typical hive will produce around 20 new queens.
Working with honey bees to make new queen cells
In the meantime, the bees know it’s important to get the original queen out of the hive or else she’ll kill these developing queens. Unfortunately, she is too fat to fly so they must put her on a diet and exercise program. The bees stop feeding her and begin chasing her relentlessly until she can fly. This takes 8 to 12 days to accomplish.
When she has reached flight weight she is pushed out and those bees who were readying themselves for the swarm will go with her. At this point they have no plan. The queen will usually fly a short distance and land on a tree, or bush or even an airplane as City Bee Savers found this year when called to O’hara airport to retrieve a new swarm. The swarm will cluster around the queen wherever she chooses to land.
Once clustered this new colony will send out scouts to look for a cavity that is 10 to 14 gallons of enclosed space. Eventually, they will have 5 to 6 scout groups that have found various locations with different values. They will swarm from 100 yards to 5 miles from the original hive. Within 2 hours to 4 days the colony will vote on which scout group found the best place and all will swarm to the new location. Only the scouts will know the location so they have a clever technique for showing the others and the queen how to get there. The scouts will fly in a spinning-wheel configuration with the queen in the center. The rest of the bees, usually numbering between 12,000 to 15,000 and as many as 25,000, will follow the wheel and queen. They fly in one large group. With that many bees flapping their wings, each at more than 200 beats per second, they are really loud!
Once to the new location the scouts land the queen at the entrance where she is walked into the cavity. A group of 100 bees or so will line up at the entrance and fan a pheromone into the air that tells all the others this is the entrance. Typically within 15 minutes all of the other bees are inside. Without wasting time they immediately begin making honeycomb and cleaning the nest site. Each bee will fill the new comb or they will feed each other with the honey they stored in their body from the previous hive while the new nest is under construction.
Back in the original colony we still have 20 or so new queens that will hatch about one week after the primary swarm. The first queen out will run to the other queen cells and kill each before they emerge. With 20 or so cells it’s inevitable more than one virgin queen emerges at the same time. They will battle it out until one is left or if the colony is very large a few of the virgin queens will opt not to fight and will take with her a small group of bees to start a colony of their own. This group is usually much smaller than the one our original swarm. Typically, 5,000 to 6,000 bees.