Swarms

Honey bees make new colonies by swarming.  About half of the worker bees and the old queen fly out of the hive to find a new place to live, leaving the remaining workers to raise a new queen.  The departing bees are a swarm, and they land somewhere, typically a tree branch or some other resting place, and form a clump or ball, where they will will stay for as little as fifteen minutes, or as long as three days.  While they are in this clump, scout bees go out looking for a new place to live, some suitable hollow or cavity where the swarm can take up residence and build a new colony.  Before they leave the old colony, the bees put the old queen on a diet to slim her down so she can fly, while the worker bees gorge themselves on honey to be ready in their new home.

Once they have found a new home, the workers set to work immediately, using the honey they have stored in themselves to produce wax and make new comb.  Once they have sections of comb built, the queen can begin laying eggs and the colony's numbers can grow.

Beekeepers love swarms (at least, the ones from hives not their own) as they represent a way to get new bees in their apiary.  We acquire these swarms in two ways.  When the swarm has just left the parent hive and is still out in the open in a clump, the beekeeper can capture this swarm by shaking or brushing it into a prepared hive.  The bees will, we hope, look around at this enclosure and decide that it is the home they've been looking for.  We can then close up the hive and bring them home.

The other way is with a bait hive, also called a swarm trap.  This is a box designed to appeal to a house-hunting swarm.  The ones I use are forty liters in capacity, just the size that swarms like.  I've rubbed the insides with beeswax and propolis, a sort of all purpose glue and binder which the bees make.  I've also used slum-gum, the residue left over from refining beeswax, a black tarry goo full of bee scent and pheromones.  And to top it off, I add a  couple of drops of lemongrass oil which mimic the queen's pheromones.  All these things make the bait hive smell like "home," and should entice the swarm to move in.  Once they do, I wait until dark, close up the box, and bring the bees home to join the others in our apiary.

Neither method is better than the other.  The swarm trap requires planning, building, labor to put the boxes up and down, and luck in placing them where the bees want to be.  Once they have moved in, you can deal with them on your own timetable.  On the other hand, open swarms usually just need a hive to catch them in, but you are subject to their whim, as you never know when or where a swarm will appear, so you have to be ready to grab your equipment and go as soon as you get a call.  But catching these swarms is a lot of fun, and can be addictive.

Swarms can come from some other beekeepers hives, or they can come from feral hives.  We like feral colonies, as they have not been managed and treated, yet still have survived out in the wild, and so have demonstrated good genetics.  There's no good way of knowing which is which when you spot a swarm, so we just take them all in and let them grow.  This raises the question of when does a swarm in the wild which originated from a managed hive become a feral colony, but that is a question for another day.