And the second…and third…and fourth…



The swarm Bob collected on Sunday









This last week was rather exciting. We learned that Beth and Kent’s house acts as a swarm attractor and that the three clusters we collected were likely not from the same swarm, but rather were virgin queen swarms. As I mentioned in the previous blog, we captured a swarm on Beth and Kent’s backyard awning last Thursday (their backyard backs up to a drainage way, providing a natural path for anything wild to cruise up and down). On Friday, Beth called me to say that her husband, Kent, noticed two more clusters on a pine tree near the awning. I coordinated with John to stop by Saturday morning to pick them up.



The capture in progress - a swift knock or five got most of
the bees in the box

Our initial thought was that these additional bees were just more from the same swarm we picked up on the previous night. We figured more bees to add to the hive meant a better chance for success and it just seemed too coincidental that the same yard would attract three separate swarms. John decided to post the question to www.beesource.com, a forum for anything bees. The response he got surprised both of us as, despite the large number of articles, books, and otherwise we had read about bees, none had mentioned the phenomenon of virgin queen swarms.





Swarms are a natural response by bees to a sense of overcrowding in the hive (a variety of things cause this sense: the population is too big, there are too many new worker bees compared to brood for them to care for, or the hive senses that the old queen is laying less eggs and raises up new queen cells). When the swarm impulse begins, the old queen trims down to prepare for flight by slowing down and then stopping laying eggs. Scouts begin checking out new places to go and, when the time comes, lead about half the hive with the old queen to new pastures, so to speak.



The parent hive raises those multiple queens to maturity. When the first queen hatches, she rushes off to see if she can kill the other queens before they hatch. Sometimes one will hatch out and the two will have a fight to the death to see who gets to rule (though this is a bit of a misrepresentation of the hive and its population: the queen is just as much a slave to her role as the workers and drones, but all work toward the benefit of the hive or the species: survival and propagation is the true king and queen of the bees). However, there are rare instances of the new queens not killing each other off. To cope with this situation, since only one queen can abide in any given hive, the virgin queen and a one or two thousand workers will swarm off (I give this number based on what we saw with the four total swarms we caught in the last week – prime swarms generally are much larger).



Surprisingly calm, but very curious



Not knowing this initially, John and I combined the first swarm with the two swarms we captured on Saturday as they seemed to get along nicely. The response he got to this on the forum was that virgin queens haven’t produced enough pheromones to lay claim to anyone, so the workers that swarm with any given one are just as happy to hook up with any queen. Our guess is that the queens did have a battle royal and that only one is left at this point.

One last thing, I mentioned a couple things that, if you were paying attention, would look like plot holes the size of Mack trucks. Between Thursday and Saturday we captured three swarms (all with no protective gear, must say; swarm collection is awesome bee PR!), but you may have noticed I said that we collected four clusters. While I was working on the top bar hive that we would install the initial three clusters in, Kent called and told me that a fourth had landed in the aforementioned tree. I texted John and we had the same thought that we could put this swarm in a nuc and would have nothing to lose and a hive to gain.



The Sunday swarm is in the nucleus hive on the left



This cluster was larger and yielded a pleasant surprise. While I was showing Kent and Beth the difference between a drone and worker bee, I saw the queen! Before this I had seen a whole of two queens: the replacement Carniloan queen we purchased and a queen from a TBH class that the instructor had pointed out. But here was my third, and a fortunate find at that! She was about 25% larger than a worker and most of that was in her abdomen.



The combined swarms in their new top bar hive



Finding this swarm’s queen made a really good day into a simply fabulous day!



The other thing is why Beth and Kent’s yard was such an attractant to the swarms. About two weeks ago, they had noticed a large swarm in their tree but then it disappeared. The swarm left pheromones behind that made the area attractive to other swarms, plus the yard is likely very close to whatever hive they swarmed from. Second, the swarm never disappeared. Instead, it found a home under a bay window. I’m also guessing it holds an unmated queen as a dozen or more drones were attempting to gain access to the hive and being repelled by workers. Quite an odd sight!

Posted by Bob Nelson