The Swarming of the Bees 

Hello shareholders! Farmer Dennis here. The regular share season begins again and I enjoy seeing familiar faces and new friends. I'd like to take a little time and relate how our bees have fared through the winter and spring.

If I had only one word to describe their condition to you, that one word would be "SWARMS." Due to the extremely mild winter and strong spring nectar flows, local bee populations have been spiking dramatically. How mild a winter? To give an example, in January I was harvesting vegetables in one of our hoop houses while watching bees gathering pollen from flowering weeds along the edges of the structure. The bees were rarely dormant this winter as temperatures rarely dropped low enough to force the colonies into normal winter behavior.

When a bee colony outgrows it's hive, the queen lays a few queen cells then leaves the hive to look for a new home, taking with her around half the population of the hive. This exodus is called a swarm. As a swarm has neither a home nor brood to defend, they tend to be much less aggressive than would normally be the case. They also usually cluster in tree branches near their old hive for a time while sending out "scouts" to look for a new abode. For these two reasons, swarms are fairly easy to capture if noticed early, leading to a beekeeper getting two hives where there had been only one before. My fellow beekeepers and I have gotten quite adept at capturing swarms this spring.

The benefits have been a drastic increase in the number of hives we're maintaining on the farm. In fact all our beekeepers have run out of equipment! The swarms may be free for the taking but the hardware costs hard money. What's alarming is the swarms keep coming. Sooner or later we will lose bees along with some of our older, proven queens.

The downsides besides equipment costs, is that each swarm we catch needs to start from scratch in a new hive. Making wax takes about 5 times more pollen/nectar than making honey so a considerable drop in honey production can be expected for those hives. Also, the later a swarm is captured the less likely it will be prepared when winter comes around again. The hives that the swarm comes from must also be considered. Will the queen cells produce healthy queens? If multiple queens hatch, they will fight each other to the death. Will the survivor be too injured to live, mate, or perform her reproductive duties for the hive? Then there's the mating flight itself. Will the queen mate successfully and if so, make it back to the hive?

With so many variables it's easy to see why old timers try to prevent their hives from swarming. It's great to catch a swarm as long as it's somebody else's. With the conditions we've had we don't have much choice in the matter. I've also learned this year that it's basically impossible to prevent a hive from swarming if it wants to. No amount of adding extra space or killing queen swarm cells seems to do the trick if the colony gets it in it's head to swarm. It has sure made this a very interesting and educational year to be beekeeping on the farm.