Hi all
I think that what is written about honey bees and swarming is much too generalized and simplified. People that have actually studied the phenomena closely find that honey bee colonies are exceedingly variable and do not behave like reflexive machines at all. Here are excerpts that hint at what I mean

> Prior to the present investigations, routine measures designed to prevent swarming had been used in the Departmental apiary, and it was expected that their absence would result in a considerable incidence of swarming. The results obtained came as a surprise: only 3 colonies swarmed out of a total of 81 in the four years, or 3 out of 62 if 1963 is excluded. Even taking into consideration the 16 colonies which superseded their queens, the number of queen replacements was still very small.

> Gary and Morse (1962) demonstrated that the destruction of virgin queens by the workers may occur fairly commonly ... Both this work and that described in the present paper show that queen replacement is by no means a straightforward process, and may be subject to many delays. 

> Simpson (1957a) showed that rthe proportion of colonies not producing any queen cells can vary with locality and year, and he concluded that the probability thart a queen would be rreplaced increased with her age. A similar indication was given by the present work, for no colony with a queen of the current year produced queen cells, and colonies with queens 1 year old had a lower queen-replacement rate than those with queens 2 and 3 years old

> Indeed, it is still not entirely clear why a colony should supersede rather than swarm, or vice versa, particularly since the present results show that supersedure may often occur during the normal swarming season

M. Delia Allen (1965) The Production of Queen Cups and Queen Cells in Relation to the General Development of Honeybee Colonies, and its Connection with Swarming and Supersedure, Journal of Apicultural Research, 4:3, 121-141

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html