Bee Beard.

A few days ago one of my protégés called to say he had problems, he thought that his bees were preparing to swarm. He described "loads of bees clustering on the front of the hive" (known as a "bee beard") and queen cells (queen bees pupating) inside. A few weeks ago he had Demareed the colony to prevent swarming. Way back in 1884, George Demaree, an American beekeeper, devised a method of swarm prevention that consisted of separating the queen from her brood. This removes the urge to swarm from the queen while the nurse bees (those tending the brood) think that they don't have a queen and so try to produce replacements. The method they use is to select very young larvae and feed them on royal jelly but, if they succeed, then the colony will swarm; this means that it is essential for the beekeeper to remove these larvae, there can be up to a dozen, before they can develop. Miss some, and you have problems.

What follows is something previously, entirely outwith my experience.

I was called out late this morning when the swarm had emerged and settled in an apple tree.

By the time I had arrived 30 minutes later, the swarm had gone and the blip is of the small bee beard that greeted me; the books tell you that this has nothing to do with swarming but is the response to heat stress. Surprising as it may seem, bees living in central Scotland are not prone to suffer from this particular affliction occurring, as it does, when the temperature reaches 35ºC or 100ºF so I am not inclined to believe these books. Caxton has a lot to answer for.

The two possibilities that we considered were: that the swarm had come out of the hive knowing where their new home was to be and gone off straight away or, that the queen was damaged in some way and when she didn't join her friends they returned home. When we inspected the colony there seemed to be far too many bees left for a swarm to have gone and we found no sign of the old queen; there were ten queen cells however, so we selected one to keep and started to remove the others. The second cell we looked at opened and a lively young queen buzzed out, ran around the comb then went over the edge and around the back out of sight. Plan B was to keep her and remove all the others which went without any further hitch.

Beehives contain a device called a queen excluder which confines the queen to the brood nest but, since queens diet before swarming so that they are light enough to fly, in this condition they can squeeze through the excluder where it may be slightly damaged; the possibility occurred to us that this might have happened and was the reason why the queen had not joined her colleagues in the apple tree. So we sieved all the bees in the portion of the hive where the old queen could be trapped through the excluder to see if she appeared, she didn't, so we shut up the hive and hoped that all was in order.

About an hour later, we heard a buzzing noise over the hives and there were a few hundred bees up there. It wasn't a swarm. If you've not seen a swarm of bees in the air, think "Disney cartoon" or something biblical - the sky turns black - twenty thousand bees in the air is a spectacular sight, what we saw was not spectacular.

We can only assume that the newly hatched virgin queen was off on her first mating flight and the other bees were the drones (male bees). Drones are remarkable creatures, I describe them in terms of their role model; think of your daughter’s boy-friends, they just lounge around all day, eating your food and waiting for the opportunity to . . . . (I won't go any further down that path).
The young queens, on the other hand, are nothing like your daughters, on their first date they will mate with several drones and, because it seemed so much fun, they will go out several more times to repeat the experience; however, they quickly become bored with the whole business and are celibate for the rest of their lives.

The one slightly worrying thing about the episode is that as the squadron of bees disappeared over the tree tops, there were a couple of swallows zooming in and out of those bees - I do hope they only ate the drones.

Footnote: the bee beard referred to here is a different phenomenon to the swarms that are worn as a beard by some strange people for a party-trick.