> It may be more accurate to call them "usurpation swarms"--in which the old queen and a group of workers usurps an established colony already prepared for winter. This would be highly adaptive genetically, and is a trait exhibited by ancestral Apis mellifera, as well as documented by Dr Wyatt Mangum, and observed by me and others in non-Africanized bees. it would also explain the spike in swarming long documented in September.
I have always attributed these swarms to varroa infestation
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