Can bee swarming be predicted

How can you tell when bees are about to swarm?

A casual observer watching the outside of a honey bee nest would probably not notice anything different during the preparations for swarming, but a beekeeper examining the inside of the hive would have a different impression. The first thing you would notice when you open the top of the colony is that the bees are "boiling," overflowing out of the top of the hive. Next, while examining the honeycomb, you would see the beginnings of the special cells where queens are reared, called "queen cups," that form the base of queen cells. They are larger than normal cells and are provisioned with royal jelly in anticipation of the hungry larval queen. The original queen will only leave the hive (with a subset of the workers) after a replacement queen begins to grow.

When a colony swarms, an unusually loud buzzing noise can be heard, louder than the normal activity of the forager bees coming and going, and then lots of bees will begin to run outside and jump into flight. It only takes a few minutes for thousands of the insects to organize into a cloud and fly away. Watching a swarm depart from a beehive is truly a spectacular sight.

How does the swarm locate its new home?

While the swarm waits in a mass, hanging in an exposed location, certain worker bees that serve as scouts fly out of the swarm and search the surrounding area for suitable places to relocate the colony. The scout bees return to where the swarm is waiting, and they "report" on the places they have found, using the waggle dance, and somehow a spot is selected. They prefer certain characteristics for a new cavity, including ample volume, and a dry space high off the ground. A consensus on the choice of a new location is reached by the scouts using a still-tobe- understood process.

Traditionally, the explanation of how the swarm finds the new location is via the dance and via olfactory cues given by scout bees. Scout bees post themselves at the entrance to the new location, and they elevate their abdomen and point it outward to expose pheromone-producing glands called Nasanov glands. The scout bees fan their wings to send out an odor trail, and it was thought that the bees in the swarm would follow the pheromone to the new site. But in 2006, Madeleine Beekman and colleagues at Cornell University reported on an experiment where they sealed the odor-releasing glands of the bees they were observing in order to see if preventing them from releasing their pheromones would disrupt the swarm's relocation.

They found that sealing the glands did not interfere with the ability of the scouts to successfully direct the swarm, and they discovered that the bees were guided to the new location by "streaker" scout bees that fly very fast (up to 3.3 feet per second) above the moving swarm. Bees have three simple light-detecting organs, called ocelli, that are located on top of their head, and these organs may play a role in enabling bees to follow the streakers flying overhead. Bees' excellent ability to see fast-moving objects may also play a role in this process.

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