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FEATURE

The Swarm Part 2 of 4

By Allen Cosnow, DVM

ere I should explain that from the point of view of the rarest of bees, a queen.
H beekeeper, this natural way of reproduction for colonies merged in the royal jelly with which the workers continue to replen-
For six days the larva of the new queen-to-be gorges, literally sub-
of honey bees (no other kinds of bees) is undesirable.
The beekeeper would much prefer to have all of the ish her cell. At the end of nine days (three days until the egg hatched
workers in the colony continue to live in his hive and make honey, and six days while she ate and grew), the larva, still inside her cell,
rather than fly off in a swarm to who knows where, to set up on spins a cocoon, and the workers seal the opening of the cell with
their own, leaving behind a skeleton crew. In fact, there are meas- new wax. Now she is a pupa. Inside her cocoon in the sealed cell
ures, beyond the scope of these paragraphs, which the beekeeper she will undergo her metamorphosis, to emerge in another nine days
employs in the spring in an effort to discourage swarming; some- (eighteen days altogether) as a virgin queen.
times these measures work, sometimes they don't. (We say swarm But as soon as the queen cell is sealed, the workers, having done
"control," not swarm "prevention.") But let's see what happens in everything possible to insure the future of the colony, have no fur-
a colony when there is no human intervention, or in spite of it: ther obligations and are now free and eager to find a new home. At
Once the colony has become intent on swarming it starts to re- this point there is little that can be done to stop them. Swarming is
duce its activity. Within 48 hours it completely suspends the collec- imminent.
tion of nectar and pollen. In the meantime, the queen is fed less Who will take part in the swarm? Almost all of the more mature
and less by the workers and as a consequence loses weight; this pre- workers (from forty to sixty percent of the total population that by
pares her to be able to fly soon. now has grown to about fifty thousand), plus a hundred or so
The workers have already prepared to raise one or several new drones, and the old queen. Remaining behind will be the newly-
queens. They began by constructing "queen cells," into each of emerged workers, some other drones, the thousands of worker lar-
which the queen deposited an egg. A queen cell starts as an ordinary vae and pupae that have not yet emerged from their cells, and one
small hexagonal worker cell in a wax comb, and the egg is also an or several sealed queen cells.
ordinary worker egg. The differences are that the workers greatly The bees wait for the first warm day, not too windy or wet, and
enlarge the cell until it is the size of an unshelled peanut, and then they swarm.
when the egg develops into a larva three days later, they supply it To be continued…
with royal jelly, a highly nutritious substance that they themselves
secrete. These two things--the abundance of space and the special Allen Cosnow, D.V.M. is a retired small animal veterinarian who keeps
nutrition--make an egg that would have produced an ordinary short- his several bee colonies on a city lot in Glencoe, Il, a lake-shore suburb of
lived worker like all the thousands of others, to develop into that Chicago. He is a veterinary school classmate of Fred H. Olin, D.V.M., M.D.

28 San Antonio Medicine • October 2018