Honeybee Swarms (DBW 2024-05-11)

Honeybee Swarms

I love honeybees. This will be my seventh year as an amateur beekeeper, and aside from family or data, there are few other topics that I could easily spend an afternoon talking to you about. They’re amazing creatures.

This past winter I had to move my beehives temporarily to the apiary of a friend. With the warmer winter, all four hives came through winter and are stronger than ever. (for reference, in recent years it’s typical to lose 50% of your hives over the winter.) But here’s the thing with strong healthy hives. They swarm! The queen bee decides that the hive has too many bees and prepares to leave, taking approximately half of the hive with her. She leaves behind a handful of unhatched queens, one of which will take over the hive in a few days.

As a beekeeper this is a good thing, if you can catch the swarm (or five, as the case may have been for me the past 10 days). It means that you (or a friend if you can’t keep it) get an extra hive for free. On the other hand, when the swarm totally absconds, it feels like a loss of free bees… and extra honey later in the season.

Regardless, every time a hive swarms I’m reminded that a healthy hive is doing exactly what it’s supposed to. Each hive has one queen bee, and the entire hive is there to serve and protect her, because she’s the one that lays the eggs to grow the hive. She exists for one purpose, to produce more bees, to form more hives, to keep forming more bees. The pollination and honey are a wonderful (and necessary) byproduct of that main purpose. After all, bees pollinate 80% of all flowering plants, so we need more of them.

How can you tell when things around you are healthy and “firing on all cylinders?” What’s one thing that is working just right, doing exactly what it was intended to do?

As you look around this summer (for those of us in the northern hemisphere) and see bees coming and going, I hope it reminds you about healthy hives and fulfilled purpose. Not just for the bees, but for you, too.

Ryan Booz

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