To prepare for swarming, nurse bees create new queen cells and the old queen’s court withholds food from the queen for a few days to make her flight-weight, since the only other time she has flown was for mating. Splitting the colony in half and leaving with the old queen allows a new colony to be born, with a new queen. This allows them to build homes and food stores that get them through the winter, prepared to come out like gangbusters in the spring. Honey bees have a large, complex society in which as many as 60,000 members perform services ranging from gathering food, constructing wax cells, tending the queen, providing health care, heating and cooling, nursing babies, etc. The honey bee’s closest cousin is the bumble bee, a fellow colonist, with a queen and worker bees, but not one that overwinters or swarms like the honey bee.
They must have felt comfortable together since they were colonists with monarchies, too! North America would not have honey bees today had the European colonists not introduced them in 1622 because they needed wax for candles.
While there are more than 20,000 species of bees in the world (think bumble, sweat, mason, leafcutter, digger, miner, carpenter, squash, blueberry, sunflower…), only seven of those species make honey. In other words, a single honey bee cannot survive alone. Do you know anyone who called an exterminator when they discovered a swarm of honey bees? If so, that is especially sad because while honey bees are responsible for every third bite of food we consume and they contribute $15 billion to American agriculture each year, as any beekeeper will tell you, they are battling a combination of diseases, parasites, pesticides, and malnutrition.Īpril and May are prime swarm season and it’s a special privilege to witness swarming honey bees.Īpp State elected to become a Bee Campus USA affiliate in 2017 to raise awareness of how vital pollinators are to life as we know it, and the challenges all pollinators face.
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