Swarming bees being rescued from the tree
Inside, nurse bees are busy caring for the brood – the eggs laid by the queen which develop into larvae, and after just 19 days a new bee emerges, ready to start work immediately.
Now it’s warming up and there’s a steady flow of food available, the queen steps up and starts laying more and more eggs, up to 2,000 every day. As you can imagine, the colony grows incredibly fast this time of year, which means as a beekeeper you’re always keeping an eye out for signs that the hive is becoming too full.
If you spot the signs early enough, you can add more space to the hive so the colony can continue expanding, but if those signs are missed there’s a good chance the colony will swarm.
Fascinating just watching busy bees at work
Swarming is nature’s way of reproducing. The queen and the colony realise it’s becoming overcrowded, so the old queen leaves the hive with around half the worker bees to find a new home.
Before this happens though, the bees also realise they’re soon going to be without a queen, so they begin raising a new queen ready to take over.
What’s fascinating is that a queen actually starts out exactly the same as any other worker bee. The queen lays an egg, after three days it hatches and from that point the bees decide its future.
All young larvae are fed royal jelly to begin with, but ordinary worker bees are then switched onto a diet of pollen and honey. Future queens however, continue being fed royal jelly throughout their development, and it’s that rich diet which triggers the genetic changes that create a fully functioning queen bee.
Jamie rescued this colony of bees in a tree in a villager’s garden
After around nine days the queen cell is sealed over, and around the same time the old queen leaves the hive with her swarm.
Which brings me to the reason I wanted to talk about bees this week. Last Saturday I was working on the allotment when my phone rang. A man from the village had found my number on the local beekeepers’ swarm collection list and thought he had a swarm of honey bees in a tree in his front garden.
So on went the bee suit and off I went armed with a large bucket, a temporary polystyrene hive called a nuc box, and a step ladder.
Sure enough, there was a swarm all balled up together. The aim is always to collect them as calmly as possible and get them into the nuc box. They were clustered around a couple of small branches, so I carefully snipped the branches and lowered them into the box.
At that point there were thousands of bees flying around trying to work out what on earth was happening, but swarms are usually surprisingly calm because they’ve got no honey or brood to defend. Once most of the bees were inside I waited, knowing that if the queen was in there the rest would slowly follow and make their own way inside.
Sure enough, after about an hour around 98% of the bees were inside the box, queen included. I brought them home and put them somewhere quiet for a few days before moving them into a new wooden hive next to my original colony. I also gave them a frame of brood and some honey from the other hive to help them get established a bit quicker.
Now when I walk down the field I’ve got two colonies busily coming and going, and I could quite happily stand there for hours watching them.
If you do see a swarm of bees, don’t panic. Most swarms are very calm and local beekeepers are usually more than happy to come and collect them. All you need to do is look on your local beekeeping association website and you’ll normally find a swarm collection contact list.
If you’ve got any questions or just fancy letting me know what you’ve been getting up to in your garden, drop me an email at: jamieslittleallotment@gmail.com
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