A Lesson on Honeybees

Mother Nature provides honeybees with what’s called a swarming instinct.  It’s her way of perpetuating the honeybee species.  This usually happens in the spring or early summer time.  But you may have had a swarm move in at these times and only notice it later.  What happens is that spring time hits.  The days get longer, the sun is at a different angle, the trees and flowers start to produce nectar.  That’s also Mother Nature at work.  The flowers need to be pollinated so they try to attract insects to do that job.  Thus, they produce something enticing to lure those pollinators, nectar.  Honeybees are naturally fuzzy and thus they spread pollen from flower to flower.  They’re actually our very best pollinators. What a wonderful symbiotic relationship!

So, the honeybees gather that nectar and pollen and return to the hive where the queen has been laying thousands (yes thousands) of eggs a day.  The hive fills up with baby bees, pollen, and most importantly nectar (which is turned into honey). 

It’s the worker bees (always female) who first notice the overcrowding.  They begin to panick.  Where will they put all the nectar coming into the hive?  In an effort to create more room in the hive, they decide to swarm.  The first thing to do is to take several (often times a dozen or more) very fresh female eggs and feed them royal jelly (a highly nutritious substance the bees make themselves).  This will turn a fresh female egg into a queen cell. Before that queen hatches out those worker bees take the old queen and put her on an exercise program (they really do).  They run her around the hive, make her ovaries shrink so she can’t lay eggs for a while, and thus she is now capable of flying.  When the first new egg is about to hatch some of the workers will regimentally march the queen out of the hive.  She is forced to fly away and a large number of her loyal workers fly with her.  This creates more space within the hive.

The queen chooses a place to land.  It could be 60 feet up on the edge of a tree branch or two feet off the ground on the trunk of Grandma’s magnolia.  When she does land, all the bees having flown with her, land in a ball around her.  Typically bees in a swarm like this are not aggressive at all.  But the queen is not happy.  She wants to be in the dark, in her home, laying eggs.  That’s her job, and she can’t do it while everyone is in a big ball.  So she’s frantic to find a home.

The queen sends out hundreds of scout bees everywhere looking for a small hole with a nice dark, extensive cavity behind it.  This could be a small hole in between the floors of your home, a knothole in the siding, a gap near your fascia board.  When that scout finds such a place, she gets very excited.  She returns to the swarm and communicates (yes, bees are wonderful communicators to each other) what she has found.  The more excited she is, the more they are inclined to listen to her.  Next, she flies to the new home and they all follow.