4.0 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE HONEYBEE
The candidate will be:
4.9 able to give an elementary description of swarming in a honeybee colony;
NOTES
Swarming is the natural impulse of honeybees to increase their population. A proportion of the colony will leave its current home to form a new colony elsewhere. The queen and a force of foraging bees will leave to set up a new home, having ensured that new queens have been raised in the old colony to take over there.
The triggers for swarming are not fully understood but preparations for swarming are obvious from the formation of queen cells in the hive a few weeks before the swarm event itself. Swarming nearly always occurs in high summer when colony numbers are at their greatest, and usually around midday on a warm day.
Just before leaving the hive the swarming bees will gorge themselves with honey. This is their fuel to last them for the time until they can set up a new colony. The energy from the honey also helps with the wax building that will be needed in the new colony. About two thirds of the workforce will leave in the swarm. The majority of the bees in the swarm will be young bees less than 10 days old.
The bees become highly agitated in the hive until they suddenly pour out of the entrance forming a large, swirling, loudly buzzing cloud. The swarm will soon start to settle into a cluster on a nearby branch or similar resting place. From here, scout bees fly out to look for a suitable cavity to use as a new home. Scouts return to the cluster and perform a version of the waggle dance on the surface of the cluster indicating the course and direction to a prospective new home. Followers of the scouts then fly out to inspect the site. When a critical mass of followers has been recruited for a favoured new site then the whole cluster will decide to decamp to the new colony. The swarming process may take anything from a few hours to a few days from leaving the hive to settling at a new site.