Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 08:18:56 -0700
Our electronic bee counters revealed something from last summer that we
have not seen before.
We placed 7 2-story nuc colonies on a peninsula extending into a Bay in
Maryland, U.S.A. Each nuc colony was started with 1 1/2 - 2 # of bees in
April. Each of the two hive boxes has 5 1/2 length, deep Dadant frames.
So, the entire hive is equal to a deep hive body with 5 deep, full-sized
frames.
The populations fall off in late April and May as the old bees die and new
bees just begin to replace the old bees. By June, these were very
strong(which was the intent of the experiment).
In June several hives swarmed. No surprise to anyone. Most produced a
primary swarm. Several thousand bees left with the old queen, and a small
number of bees returned later in the day.
Some hives produced secondary or after-swarms over a period of days
following the initial swarm. Again, no surprise. And in each case, most
of the bees that left never returned.
One hive did a curious thing. It swarmed early in the month. The colony
rapidly regained strength. In late June another swarm emerged. And
between late June and mid-July, four swarms departed. Again, no surprise.
Now for the catch. In each case, within about an hour of the swarm leaving
the hive, they all came back, and they picked up extra bees as they came
back. In other words, more bees came back to the hive than left (by
several hundred bees). And these were large swarms - thousands of bees, as
many as 400 or more raced through our counters every 30 seconds as they
left the hive.
You may wish to argue my semantics, call this absconding not swarming,
whatever. Bottom line, has anyone else observed this behavior? And does
anyone have an explanation?
Cheers
Jerry
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Jerry J. Bromenshenk, Ph.D.
Director, DOE/EPSCoR & Montana Organization for Research in Energy
The University of Montana-Missoula
Missoula, MT 59812-1002
E-Mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel: 406-243-5648
Fax: 406-243-4184
http://www.umt.edu/biology/more
http://www.umt.edu/biology/bees
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