4 Reasons Hives Swarming Can Be a Good Thing
Swarming is the honeybee's method of propagating their species and is a perfectly normal and natural process. As a quick overview, let me explain how honeybee reproduction works.
The first thing to know about honeybee reproduction is there are three categories of honeybees in a colony: the queen, the workers, and the drones. Queens lay eggs in the honeycomb cell and aside from mating once early in their life, that is all they do. Drones are the only males in the colony and all they ever do is eat and mate. Consequently a drone mating coincides with his death; the story behind that is another conversation. The workers are the rest of the females and have multitudes of responsibilities throughout their lives. Once again, the subject of another conversation. A colony of honeybees can vary in numbers depending on the stage of development but range from about 10,000 to over 100,000 bodies per hive. Each healthy hive has one queen, about 20% drones, and the rest are workers.
The next thing to understand about swarming is what is actually taking place during the process. A swarm that leaves the hive consists of the queen and some percentage of the worker bee population. They take to the air in search of a new home and then set up shop to develop a new colony. In the old hive they just vacated is the drones, the remaining worker bees, and one or more young queens either just hatched or soon to hatch. The young queens will take their mating flight after hatching, hopefully return to the hive mated well, kill any other young queens that could be competition, and then begin her reign as the new queen of the hive. And with that, hopefully two fully functional and healthy colonies are existing in the area as a result.
Swarming Improves the Natural Population of Honeybees in the Wild
So this swarming process and philosophy is my first and most important point swarming being a good thing. When honeybees swarm they are repopulating the earth and strengthening the overall status of honeybees in the wild. Many beekeepers cringe when they think of swarming because they view it as a missed opportunity to populate another one of their hives and they believe a hive that swarmed will produce less honey that season due to the dedicated time and resources swarming requires takes away from honey production. Admittedly as a beekeeper myself, I also mourn the lost opportunity to capture and house another hive will certainly do so if I am provided the opportunity. But even with that being the case, I also celebrate the opportunity for the young colony to thrive in the wild do what honeybees do best without man's manipulation. As far as the reduction in honey production, it is certainly at least true temporarily but I have not really found that a hive swarming means a reduced harvest that season. Just last year alone, I captured a swarm and installed it. That swarm filled my 20-frame Layens hive to its maximum capacity, swarmed again, and overwintered beautifully. In my Layens hive system that means the swarm produced at least 80 lbs of harvestable honey, 40 lbs of overwintering honey, propagated itself, and healthily closed out the season. The only room for improvement there could have been having two honey harvests but of course that is pretty much impossible because it was a new swarm from the same Spring. What more could a beekeeper ask for without just getting downright greedy?
Swarming Reduces Stress in the Colony
There is a cycle and tempo to each beehive throughout the season. In a perfect world each beehive starts the Spring with a low population from surviving Winter, explodes into huge numbers (remember the 10,000 to 100,000 spread), swarms one of more times depending on the strength and temperament of the colony, spends most of May and early June packing the honey in to prepare for the dry months, and then pushes hard one last time in September to load themselves full for Winter again. That is the normal order of things with a healthy hive under normal conditions.
Many beekeepers do everything they can to stop a hive from swarming because they believe swarming reduces honey yield for that season. They try to time when they give the bees more space, remove queen cells from the bottom of comb, and other techniques geared to thwart swarming. Because swarming is an instinctual and natural process, they often find their efforts to be in vain and the bees swarm anyway. Even worse, in my opinion, is they are stressing the hive even more than just letting it run its course. Why would you kill queen cells when one of those just might be the new queen needed to replenish the hive? Why are we so arrogant that we think we know what the bees need better than the bees? Every act a beekeeper executes to undermine the bee's natural process is completely counterintuitive to me. It makes as much sense as trying to glue fur back onto a shedding animal because you think they look cold.
Swarming Replenishes the Genetics Within the Colony
After each swarm, a new queen goes out and mates with hopefully 15 to 20 drones. Those drones come from her hive and other surrounding hives. The drones actually congregate in a single location and simply fly around until queens from neighboring hives arrive for mating. It is quite comparable to our human single's bar. She then stores the sperm she has collected that afternoon in her abdomen and will disburse sperm from that event as needed to fertilize eggs the rest of her life. She will lay an average of 2,500 eggs per day for a possible lifespan of 7 to 8 years. But there does come a point in her life when she starts to reach the bottom of the barrel and will simply start to run out of available sperm. Of course if that happens she can no longer fertilize eggs and therefore will only produce drones and no worker bees. That is not a good situation for a hive. The swarming process is the bee's way of refreshing the gene pool by the old queen leaving and a young queen taking over with a freshly mated abdomen. Without that fresh injection of new sperm, the hive would simply die out. And once again, the beekeeper runs the risk of catastrophically affecting a hive by meddling in the process at just the wrong time.
Swarming is a Natural Defense Against Infestation of Varroa Mites
If you've been interested in beekeeping within the past 20 to 30 years, you have heard the horrors of the dreaded varroa mites. And indeed, the varroa mite is a nasty little pest than can cause hives to collapse. The varroa mite is probably the top focus of conversation amongst beekeepers and probably the most published topic in beekeeping books, magazines, scholastic research, and even blogs. Beekeepers use all kinds of tracking methods, pest management practices, and chemical applications trying to battle the varroa mite trying to save their hives from a horrible fate. Strangely enough however, swarming is one of the honeybees best defenses when it comes to surviving a mite infestation. How does swarming affect mite infestations? I'm glad you asked. To understand the concept we need to nail down the reproductive cycle of the honeybee, the lifecycle of the varroa mite, and how they operate in relation to one another.
Let's focus on the honeybee first. The average number of days it takes to raise a new egg-laying queen is 27 days. That timeframe starts with an egg being laid, the queen developing in the cell for 16 days, 5 - 8 days of her continued reproductive development after emergence, and the rest is her mating flight and return which we have previously discussed. Once she returns and starts laying eggs and it takes an additional 6 days for the egg to develop into a developed larva and ready for capping. For the sake of argument, let's assume the queen cells were made before the old queen vacated with the swarm and the queen vacated on day 14, two days before emergence. That leaves a minimum of a 23 day break in the brood cycle if everything happened just as fast as it possibly could. The reality is probably more in the average range of 30 days. Any complications or challenges within the hive only extend that number of days further out.
Image sourced from https://www.britannica.com/animal/honeybee
Now let's consider the lifecycle of the varroa mite. The mites jump onto adult worker bees in the field and hitch a ride back to the hive attached to the honeybee. Once inside the hive they look around for open cells with larva inside that is about 5 to 6 days old. They enter the cell, hide behind the larva, and wait for the worker bees to close the cell. Once the cell is closed the mites begin feeding on the larva and breeding safely closed within the capped cell. The female mite lays her first egg 60 hours after the cell is capped and will lay an egg every 30 hours thereafter. It takes a female mite 7 to 8 days to develop from the egg laid to reproductive maturity. When the adult bee hatches out of the capped cells, any mature female mites leave the cell and attempt to repeat the process. The males and any immature mites remain behind. So in summation, the mites have about a 9 day reproductive cycle.
Graphic sourced from https://www.bayer.com/sites/default/files/The_Varroa_Mite_2020.pdf
Graphic sourced from https://www.bayer.com/sites/default/files/The_Varroa_Mite_2020.pdf
What swarming means to the relationship between the hive and mite mortality is two-fold:
About 35% of the adult mite population end up leaving the hive with the bees that swarm.
The mites left behind are unable to multiply for the broodless period which means no new mites between day 9 and 6 days after the new queen starts laying which comes to an average of 21 days with no mite productivity.
In the game of surviving the varroa mites, survival is dependent on keeping the varroa population down. The mites are here to stay and no amount of bee effort, hive management, or chemical applications will completely eradicate the mites. The bees have adapted to tolerating pests of all kinds as long as the nuisance remains at a level that is manageable. Swarming is part of the biological process that helps the honeybees maintain the balance and stand a chance in the fight.
Conclusion
Armed with that information and determined to develop our farm to be Naturally Grown, I never do anything to discourage swarming. I view swarming as a signal the hives are strong and healthy, a helpful boost to the wild population, a fresh injection of much needed drone sperm, a necessary Spring cleaning, and simply a step in the natural order of things. Will I do my best to catch the swarms and put them in a new hive? YOU BETCHA! That is a wonderful way to increase the size of your apiary and allow the health of your previous hives to continue growing strong.
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