From: Lear, Eddy(ENL)
Sent: 04 December 2000 12:10 PM
To: 'Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology'
Subject: RE: Queens and swarms

Chris Slade wrote:
I agree with Bob when he says that laying queens can fly.  I have seen it
happen many times when a hive is disturbed.

However I do not agree with his (Bob) statement that the queen and she alone
controls when the swarm leaves the hive.

In that case it was definitely the workers who were the dominant force
behind
the swarm and not the queen.


I would like to agree to some extent by Chris' observations, but on the
other hand I will acknowledge that our bees can be very different to their
European counterparts.
I have been running an experiment on my farm to see whether my hypothesis
about contraction or invasion of varroa is valid.
As a bit of background, a few of us have found that when manipulating
colonies in a prolific swarming flow such as when our bees are in the
"aloes", queens are quite often distributed through the hives of the apiary.
Hives were marked and the queens found and marked. After two weeks the honey
was harvested. A few days later we did a search for the queens and found
nearly 50% of the queens were in different hives to which they were
originally.  Some hives were queenless. It was assumed that during the
harvesting that the queen had become airborne through fright or even as the
result of shaking out of the honey super.
One of our scientists recently undertook some experiments to determine
whether bees from one race drift into another race's colony and/or do they
invade.  It was certainly found that A.m. capensis invaded, whereas A.m.
scutelata were drifters.  But there are other factors which could be
involved here but not part of my discussion.
Last year around September, a beekeeper who is a major migratory within my
district warned me that he had varroa in his hives.  I then unfortunately
found varroa in one of my hives in December. On inspection I visited my
hives again in February and was astounded not to find varroa. On closer
examination of the brood area I found an abnormal number of Bee scorpions
(Ellingsenuis fulleri).
I suspected that the contamination of my hive was due to the drifting
behaviour of drones, and that somewhere along the line a drone from an
infected colony had found its way into mine.
I therefore decided to spread the hives out on my farm so that bees of one
colony would not drift from one hive to another. I also installed a modified
queen excluder (what I call a drone trap) on the front of my hive entrance.
I did a similar thing on my observation hive, except no drone trap.  What
the drone trap does; it allows drones out of the hive but not back in again.
The colony in the observation hive tried absconding about six times.  For
some reason we have not had much success in retaining A.m, scutelata in OHs
which have one frame above the other and I don't know of anyone who has kept
bees in such a hive for more than one season. There is better success when
multiple frames are used.  Each time the bees swarmed the queen could not
get out and so the bees returned.
It was interesting to see just prior to their act of absconding how the bees
emptied all the honey reserves and then proceeded to open the capped brood
pulling all the pupas out, leaving a mess on the floor. The Bee scorpions
were also noticed in abnormal numbers hiding in the cracks between the
woodwork and the glass.
Finally the bees killed the queen as their last resort before finally
swarming.
I am well aware that what takes place in these OH's is not natural and
therefore one cannot draw too many conclusions, but from what I have
observed, the queens have little to say about swarming and that it is in the
bees design to behave in their prescribed pattern. My conclusion is that
bees are neither democratic or autocratic, maybee theocratic.

Eddy Lear
South Africa


PS. Since our season is still in its first half, I cannot say whether my
method of trying to keep varroa at bay is working, but to date none of my
bee colonies have been infiltrated.