Hi all
Swarming is the normal reproductive behavior of honey bees. There is no "cause of swarming." You might as well look for the "cause" of reproduction, or the cause of the weather. In 1965, Delia Allen reported that she followed 81 colonies through four summers. 25 colonies produced sealed queen cells. Of these only 3 swarmed, 19 replaced their queens, and 6 neither swarmed nor replaced the queen.
More recently, Heather Mattila and associates wrote:
Swarming is a complex, multi-step process
that is mediated by multiple environmental,
social, physiological, and molecular factors.
Four colony-level changes that
have been hypothesized to trigger swarming
preparation: increasing colony size (in terms of
both number of workers and amount of comb),
congestion of the brood nest, skewing of worker
age distribution toward younger individuals,
and reduced transmission of queen-produced
substances/pheromone. However, these
factors likely act in concert or are correlated
with an as-yet-unidentified critical cue because
individually they do not reliably trigger swarming.
Decades of sophisticated research have provided
a detailed understanding of the numerous behavioral
signals that are used to coordinate this
process. However, our understanding of the
chemical signals that are associated with these
behaviors and the molecular mechanisms that
underlie them is in its infancy --
(Grozinger, Richards, Mattila. 2014)
ΒΆ
As a final note, I would refer anyone interested in this topic to Rob Page's "Spirit of the Hive"
> Where does the spirit of the hive reside? At least to some extent it is in the ovaries of a crowd of bees working in a dark hive (Robert E. Page Jr. 2013)
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