Honey Bee Swarm Photo Print

"Honey Bee Swarm" by Catherine Sherman. A swarm of honey bees clings to branches of a maple tree in a Kansas City area neighborhood in early May, which I saw on my usual walking route in my neighborhood. I heard the honey bees before I saw them. They were making a very loud buzzing sound, like some noisy landscaping machine. I walked to the tree where I saw thousands of bees flying around and thousands more clustered on a tree. .In the photo, taken the next day, the bees are calm and huddled on the tree branches, making no sound. On the third day, the bees had vanished, leaving no sign but a single honey bee flying around the tree as if to ask "Where did everyone go?" Swarming is a honey bee colony's way of reproduction. In the process of swarming, a single colony splits into two or more distinct colonies. Honey Bees are non-aggressive in this state, since they have no hive to protect. In most climates, western honey bees (apis mellifera) swarm in the spring and early summer, when there is an abundance of blooming flowers from which to collect nectar and pollen. In response to these favorable conditions, the hive creates one to two dozen new queens. Just as the pupal stages of these "daughter queens" are nearly complete, the old queen and about half to two-thirds of the adult workers leave the colony in a swarm, traveling some distance to find a new location suitable for building a hive, such as a hollow tree trunk. Successful scouts will return to report the location of suitable nesting sites to the other bees. In the temporary location the cluster will determines the final nest site based on the level of excitement of the dances of the scout bees. It is unusual if a swarm clusters for more than three days at an intermediate stop. In the old colony, the emerging daughter queens will fight one another until there is only one surviving queen.