By Karen Dewhirst, Museum Experience Manager, Science/Exhibits

Swarming bees may look scary to the untrained eye, but they are a natural phenomenon for bees to multiply the colony.

Honey bees often swarm in the spring to multiply the colony. The old queen leaves with about half of the colony of the oldest bees and moves to a temporary site near their old hive. The Museum’s bees tend to like the Ginko trees on the Museum rooftop. The swarm then sends out scout bees to search the area for a suitable new home. The new home must be just the right size and shape, and located near water and good food sources. When the scouts return to the swarm they communicate their enthusiasm for the new home sites they have found with the rest of the swarm by dancing on the outside of the swarm of bees. The swarm makes a collective decision to move to best of the sites found by the scout bees.

When the swarm is collecting in the temporary site, the bees are generally not aggressive because they don’t have any honey or home to protect. If the Museum staff finds the swarm in a nearby tree, they cut off the branches with the cluster of bees on them, put branches and bees into a cardboard box to transport and take them to bee hives at another location. The bees are given wax honey comb upon which to build a nest and food to get them off to a fast start in their new home.

The worker bees that are left behind in the Museum hives will raise a new queen from the eggs laid by the old queen before she left with the swarm. The worker bees feed several of the eggs a steady diet of royal jelly. It takes 16 days to raise a new queen. While they wait for the new queen to emerge, there is plenty of work to do in the hive. The worker bees must still feed the eggs and larvae, keep the hive clean, gather pollen and nectar, and defend the colony against intruders.

Swarms occur in spite of beekeepers interventions. The Museum beekeepers tried the traditional methods to minimize the chance for swarms. However, the hives swarmed several times in the span of a few weeks. The unusually mild winter and the early arrival spring with extremely warm weather have created an unusually “swarmy” spring. Many long time beekeepers are finding spring 2012 to be a challenging season to keep bees.

If you are fortunate enough to find a swarm of honey bees, call a local beekeeper to capture the swarm. Beekeepers want swarms and the bees will have a new home!