What is the purpose of a colony of bees?
Pollination? Wrong.
Bees do this by accident. They don’t realize how much they’re helping humans and wouldn’t care if they did.
Making honey? Wrong.
Bees make honey because this is a stable food source. The fact that humans like honey is again irrelevant to the bees.
Bees are like any other wild animal. They exist for two reasons: to survive and to reproduce.
Except that, in the case of honeybees, most of them don’t reproduce. They are part of a colony, and the colony tries to survive and to reproduce.
Which brings us to “casting swarms.”
I don’t recall ever coming across that term until veteran beekeeper Jim Tew used it in a presentation to the Blount County Beekeepers Association meeting in August. Jim said then that bees will try to survive until they can find a suitable place to live — a good hollow tree or something like that — and “cast a few swarms.”
The term popped up again when I was reading Thomas Seeley’s Honeybee Democracy, a fascinating book that is built around Seeley’s decades of study of swarming behavior.
In upstate New York, where I live, my colonies begin sending forth their drones in late April, and they begin casting their swarms . . . a week or two later in early May. (p. 35)
* * *
An enduring mystery about honeybees is what exactly stimulates a colony to begin rearing queens and thereby initiate the process of swarming. Beekeepers know that certain conditions inside a colony’s hive (congestion of the adult bees, numerous immature bees, and expanding food reserves) and outside the hive (plentiful forage and spring time) are correlated with the start of queen rearing for swarming. Nevertheless, to this day, no one knows what specific stimuli the worker bees are sensing and integrating when they make the critical decision to start the swarming process. (p. 36) (quoted material)
Swarming is what bees do. It’s one of their basic purposes. As good beekeepers, we should let them do it.
Related articles
Jim Tew describes the inside of a feral beehive
Tew: the natural hive is not a ‘permanent’ home for bees
Key words: bees, beekeeping, casting swarms, pollination, Thomas Seeley, Honeybee Democracy, swarming, honey
Blount County Beekeepers Association 