CAMDEN – After days — nay weeks —of clammy, rainy, foggy, and generally crummy weather, a break in the yuck Saturday, July 1, was the perfect time for a Camden honeybee colony to swarm. And thanks to the caring nature of nearby neighbors, the honeybees were “caught,” accepted the offer to move into the rescue beekeeper’s hive box and were eventually rehomed at a nearby beekeeper’s yard.

Honeybee swarm season in Maine is typically late spring and early summer, but honeybees can swarm at any time under the right conditions.

After several days (or in our case over nearly six weeks) of nonstop rain, a break with clear skies, sunshine, warm temperatures and high humidity act like a siren’s call for cramped and congested bee colonies to divide and swarm.

According to Maine State Apiarist Jennifer Lund: “Swarming is honeybee reproduction at the colony level and is necessary for the survival of the species. When a colony swarms, the colony splits into two or more distinct colonies, growing the population of honeybees in the local environment.”

Among the various factors that prompt swarming, congestion is the most important factor.

Strong honeybee colonies expand their worker numbers exponentially every 18-22 days. Strong colonies also make more honey, store more pollen, and resist disease and manage pests better. Responsible beekeepers regularly check the status of each of their hives, and one of the things they watch for is swarming behavior.

Overcrowding occurs when a colony runs out of room to store honey and pollen, and the queen has no more open honeycomb cells in which to lay her eggs. Baby bees are hatching by the hundreds every other day, the weather is beautiful and copious varieties of flowers and trees are blooming, providing lots of pollen and nectar to collect and bring back home.

When the colony decides to swarm, there is work to do to prepare for the main event. They will select as many as 20 eggs and begin growing some new queens by feeding them royal jelly and building extra large queen cell encasements around them.

Queen honeybees, often too heavy to fly, are pestered by the workers to lose weight in preparation for flight. Finally, the workers will begin to gorge themselves with honey so they have a full belly for the trip to a new home.

It takes about 16 days for a new queen to emerge from her egg cell, so on day 14 or 15, it’s go-time.

On swarm day, at the witching hour, between 40% and 70% of the colony will fly out of the hive, pushing the queen out with the first wave. She will fly to a nearby tree branch and everybody will follow her pheromone scent and cluster around her, keeping her safe and warm deep within.

Honeybee swarms can most often be found hanging from a tree limb or clustered around the trunk of a smaller tree not far from the original hive. But they sometimes cluster on the side of a building, the hood of a vehicle or under porch steps.

The queen is not a great flyer and the workers have bellies full of honey in preparation for building new honeycomb at their new home, so they don’t go far from their hive on the first flight. Those factors, along with not having any honey stores to protect, make a swarm some of the calmest bees to be around for the general public. Their clustered numbers are intimidating to see, but these bees are generally very gentle to work with when people are calm and quiet around them.

Saturday’s swarm catch went smoothly, with several Harden Avenue neighbors joining in to help the beekeeper. Tom and Sue Shaffer made the call to their friend, Chip Dewing, after witnessing the cloud of bees swarming out of their neighbors’ hive and clustering on a small tree across the street. Chip messaged me, so I gathered equipment and arrived on scene.

More neighbors, Heather and Chris Rogers, also helped, with Chris running home to bring back a tree pruner. The Shaffer’s recorded the action, Chip steadied the ladder, and Chris and some others pulled the line on the tree pruner to clip the limb on which the bees were clustered.

The tree limb with the bees was slowly brought down the ladder and placed on top of a prepared hive box, where they were very happy to climb in and take up residence. Within an hour, all of the bees were inside the box and they were ready for transport.

Luckily, beekeeper Graham Phaup answered the call: “Want some free bees?”

Loaded into my Nissan Rogue, it was a quick trip one street over and the bees were set up in Graham’s back yard, joining five other neatly organized hives in his bee yard.

Maine Dept. of Agriculture Conservation & Forestry

Apiary (Honeybee) Program: List of Swarm Collectors and Other Information

https://www.maine.gov/dacf/php/apiary/index.shtml