Hello, Gang,

A few days ago, I got a call from Legacy Park, a local retirement home in 
Shawnee, OK, regarding a swarm clustered on a small tree branch on its 
perimeter.  It had swarmed, in fact, the previous night, and got rained 
on, which reduced the original large swarm to the size of a football by 
the time I arrived at the scene.  

Here are a few observations about this particular swarm that drew my 
attention on their strange behavior, which forced me to think they were or 
could be indeed AHB’s.

1) The size of their cluster was relatively small, less than the size of a 
football.
2) Once I removed the initial cluster, the invisible parent colony spun 
off a few more, all smaller than football, typically the size of a 
grapefruit.  Their cluster size being nearly equal, I could not ascertain 
them to be the primary and the secondary swarms.
3) One word that might sum up their behavior was they were agitated or 
excited, constantly flying over me and the cluster location.  I know a 
swarm can be in a bad mood once rained on particularly overnight.  But 
they were exceptionally “nervous.”
4) When I boxed them and relocated to Research Farm early in the morning, 
nearly all of them crawled out onto the truck bed where I had the box 
whereas another colony I also moved remained calm.
5) To entice them, I have given them two deeps with some drawn combs, but 
they elected not to stay put (to my relief?); personally, I wanted to keep 
them to further observe their progress: buildup, foraging, mite-
resistance, etc.  At one point, all of them got out and clustered beneath 
outside the screened bottom board; it was then when I smelled that they 
might escape.  No I did not have a queen excluder to block the queen in, 
either.  When I poured them back in on the landing board, they all looked 
and behaved as if "bewildered," not going into the box quickly.
6) Their presence apparently made nearby colonies agitated as well since 
some of them, being disoriented, tried to enter neighboring colonies.

Around 2003 the Oklahoma State University Extension Office did a DNA test 
on a swarm in downtown Shawnee, OK, and they confirmed the presence of 
AHB’s in my area, which excited me.  But till the other day, I have not 
seen any weird behavior I am describing above.  All the drones looked much 
smaller; most important, some of the bees’ thorax had this light tan 
color, as if they belonged to different sub species, a color I have never 
seen.  There were quite a few of those “mutations,” including drones. I 
felt as though I were looking at a more primitive version of scuts 
whatever they might have looked like in the past.

Any one with AHB swarm experience?

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