The bees. They're going mental!

[jammy_basturd]

Just watching TV in the living room when I hear an almighty hmming/buzzing din. I look around into the garden out the back and the bees the neighbour keeps (4 hives) are all flying around within my garden. Literally every square inch of the air around my garden is covered with bees flying here, there and everywhere. A few minutes go by and they all start to settle on one point on the fence, as shown in the pics below. What on earth are they doing, creating a new hive or something?

Have to say it was an absolutely incredible thing to watch!

PS. Just as I'm typing this, the sparrow hawk we have in the area swoops down across the meadow over the back of the garden!

[andrew_huxtable]

I think what is happening is a new queen bee has been born and has decided it is time to jump house, so she will bugger off with a few of the drones and set up a new shop

[mrmaggit]

Advise your neighbour, he'll want to catch the swarm for a new colony.

[jammy_basturd]

Ahhh, too late. Half an hour later they had all pretty much gone apart from a few loners.

[daved]

It's that time of year again and one of our colonies swarmed last week. Looks like our hive had run out of room and the queen left, taking half the colony with her. They're quite docile when they swarm, despite what it looks and sounds like as they've no brood or stores to defend and have all had their fill of honey, which affects them like a large meal affects us. They settled in a tree and a couple of hours later we managed to catch them and get them into a spare hive. The old hive is well down on numbers but a new queen is on her way as I type. New hive is doing well so far.

[mrsxllifts]

Sorry to sound thick, but where do you get new queens from? I thought a new one was born every known and then in a hive then just bogged off with some of the other to start up on their own? Or am I completely wrong? If you breed another queen can you remove them before they leave and settle them into a 'non-queened' hive?is there a market for queens? Can they be specially breed or do you have to wait til it just happens?

[daved]

mrsxllifts said:

Sorry to sound thick, but where do you get new queens from? I thought a new one was born every known and then in a hive then just bogged off with some of the other to start up on their own? Or am I completely wrong? If you breed another queen can you remove them before they leave and settle them into a 'non-queened' hive?is there a market for queens? Can they be specially breed or do you have to wait til it just happens?

Not sounding thick at all - sounding just like me a year ago. Still no expert on the subject really, but yes, queens can be bred and bought from beekeeping supply places to put into a hive for a new colony. There's a more natural process which goes on in the hive every now and again. If the normal bees think that the queen is on her way out - they last 4-5 years all being well, they'll 'create' a new queen. She's just a normal bee larvae until the other bees decide she's destined for greater things and give her a blob of royal jelly. She'll eat this and emerge as a queen.

Then there's the swarming - as we discovered last week and will discover again if we're not careful. If the bees are unhappy for whatever reason - lack of space or poor conditions for instance, they'll decide to clear off and take the queen with her. Roughly half of them will go off in search of a new home - possibly in the wild if it suits them, leaving half the colony behind - without a queen. This looks to be planned in advance as when we opened our hive there were still lots of bees and approximately 10 queen cells. So, it looks like the bees know they're swarming soon and prepare a new queen for the remainder of the colony, although I'm not sure why they prepare so many. If left to develop, each of these new queens could take off with some bees and eventually leave us with nothing. So, we removed all bar one of the queen cells which will soon become the new queen of the hive. Other queen cells were given to a beekeeping buddy for his new hive.

I'm sure it's a lot more complicated than that, but the simple version does me at the moment.