Romancing the Swarm

A healthy honeybee colony, with a summertime population of 50,000 bees, will winter over with only 15,000 workers and the queen. A third of that wintertime population won’t make it through to spring. As the weather warms up, the queen awakens from her torpor, and the surviving crew gets busy preparing for a new season of growth. The comb, now almost empty of the honey that sustained them through the winter, needs to be refurbished to the queen’s satisfaction so she can start laying eggs again. The worker bees will clean out each cell, smooth the walls and add a thin layer of propolis which acts as an antibacterial buffer for the eggs. The queen will not lay an egg in any cell until this step has been completed.

Before laying, she puts her head inside the cell and measures it with her antennae. The size of the cell determines what kind of egg she lays. 90% of the cells in a hive are the correct size for workers (females) since they make up the vast majority of the colony. The drones (males) make up the remaining 10 % of the summertime population and require a bigger cell. If the builder bees determine that the colony needs more drones, a worker’s cell will be enlarged to a drone sized cell and after measuring, the queen will lay a drone egg. If the builders determine fewer drones are needed, as is the case in late summer, a drone sized cell will be reduced to a worker sized cell and the queen will lay a female egg.

Right now our soon to be queen is rebuilding the numbers, laying only female eggs and then will slowly add the male eggs in time for mating season. In full production, she lays up to 2,000 eggs a day, and the population inside the hive begins to swell.

When the hive starts to get crowded, the colony will choose to swarm. The worker bees will then create elongated cells in which the queen will lay the egg that will eventually become the new queen.

The original queen, after laying her replacement, leaves the existing hive with half the workers in search of a new home. It is a honeybee colony’s ultimate goal to reproduce itself by swarming such that one colony becomes two.

Scouts will travel for miles looking for the perfect place to start over, and we hope they discover, and move into, our swarm boxes. We built the boxes just the right size and put them up in just the right trees at just the right height. We made sure they were clean and dry and then we rubbed the inside of them with wax, propolis and lemongrass. Now it’s just a waiting game. Even though it’s unlikely for a colony to swarm this early in the season, we check the boxes daily (okay, multiple times a day) to see if any scouts are inspecting them.

We are, in fact, the perfect forever home for them – they just don’t know it yet. We actively encourage clover in our pastures and never mow our lawn too short. We planted native plants in and around our fields – and we never, ever, use any pesticides, or herbicides of any kind.

Short of begging, I’m not sure what else we can do. So, if you see a honeybee scout looking for a home, please (please!) send them our way.