June is a month all beekeepers love. Flowers are blooming, and bee colonies are building up strength fast. The queen bee can be laying up to 3,000 eggs per day — that’s more than her own body weight in eggs.
As field bees bring in pollen to feed the young and nectar to make honey, they start to fill the combs with this stored food. Unless the beekeeper adds sufficient extra room to the hive, the queen may run out of empty cells to lay eggs. Under these conditions the bees start to feel overcrowded, and the colony decides to swarm. This is colony-level reproduction.
The bees will start to raise dozens of young queens in special queen cells. These larval queen bees will take 16 days to hatch. A few days before they do, the reigning queen bee will leave the hive along with up to half the worker bees. Before leaving the hive, the bees will fill themselves up with honey, as they may not eat again for days. The buzz of this huge mass of bees, which can number 10,000 to 40,000 bees, can be heard from a few hundred yards away.
Then they will land on a nearby tree branch, fence post or even a car. They will cluster together in what can look like an odd-shaped basketball made of bees. At this time, the bees have no home to defend and are so full of honey and consumed with the task and excitement of moving house that they are at their least aggressive. People very rarely are stung by swarming bees.
Once the swarm cluster has formed, scout bees are sent out to look for a new location to build their hive. This may be a hollow tree, an empty bee hive or the wall cavity of a house. This is the time when it’s important to capture the swarm. If you see a swarm, please do not spray them. Instead call me — 299-6948 — or any other beekeeper or the Maine State Beekeepers Association’s swarm team (619-4BEE).
If the swarm is hanging within reach, the beekeeper can shake them into a new hive or cut the branch and put the swarm in a box to take away. If they are too high, I put out a swarm trap. This is basically a small hive with a few old combs and a few drops of lemongrass oil in it. Bees love the smell of the lemon grass oil, because it smells similar to the queen’s pheromones. Then we wait to see if the swarm moves in.
When a scout bee finds a potential new home — such as the swarm trap — it will pace out the interior, mark it with scent and report back to the cluster, performing a waggle dance to convey the location. Then other bees will go to check it out. If they like it, they too will return and tell others about it. Other scouts finding other locations do the same thing. It may take the swarm hours or even days to come to a consensus, but eventually they all will take off and fly to the new home and start to build combs.
In the meantime, back at the parent colony, the first queen bee will hatch out of her larval cell. The first thing she will do is seek out all her sister queen bees still sealed in their wax cells. She will rip open the side of the cell and sting her sister to death. If one of those queens hatches before her sister gets to her, there will be a fight to the death. The victor will be the new queen of the hive.
A big swarm can build comb incredibly quickly. I’ve seen them fill two deep hive bodies with comb in about two weeks, something a package of bees can take two months to do.
Next to harvesting honey, catching swarms is my favorite beekeeping activity, so call me instead of spraying them.
Peter Cowin, aka The Bee Whisperer, is President of the Penobscot County Beekeepers Association. His activities include honey production, pollination services, beekeeping lessons, sales of bees and bee equipment and the removal of feral bee hives from homes and other structures. Check out “The Bee Whisperer” on Facebook, email petercowin@tds.net or call 207-299-6948.