>If a third swarm is to issue, the bees now cluster about the remaining royal cells having queens in them, the same as before, keeping all queens prisoners except one, which liberated queen scolds and pipes away, as did the one before, the others in the cells showing their anger back again by a chorus of quahking immediately after the first ceases piping, when, after the lapse of two days, or such a matter, the third swarm issues. 

At some risk of alienating the Doolittle devotees, I question that queens are emoting anger, that workers are keeping queens prisoners in cells, or emerged queens are scolding anyone in particular especially their sister queens. I say this not to question the Doolittle but to bring attention to the complexity of biological responses to environmental conditions. The swarm urge, that is sometimes manifest in sequential events,  still illudes our complete understanding.  While we seek simplicity to communicate this complicated process,  swarming proceeds on an entirely different level void of both simplicities and, to a great extent, our understanding.  It's not that we shouldn’t try to communicate, and in Doolittle's time anthropomorphic phrases were common, but in our time the beekeeping lore is often interpreted as a prescription to be followed exclusive, or in place of, the effort of needed observation. The prescriptive interpretation of beekeeping, which is what I'm attempting to uncover, is pervasive and an impediment to the art required to find a balance between what can be known about the biology and our observation that often contradicts the lore.  Yesterday I found a colony with a large population of bees and many swarm cells including a few that were capped, one-day-old eggs in many cells, and the mated queen laying with indifference to the swarm urge fully engaged around her. All this from a package installed a mere eight weeks prior during a cold spring which included twenty-two days of April rain.  It happens all the time. 




Bill Hesbach
Cheshire CT 


 

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