I've not seen this before - advice?

[johnmcc]

For the last two weeks one of my two WBC hives has been extremely active with hundreds of bees in and out and around the front of the hive at all times of day and all day long, and a couple of times I thought they might be about to swarm, or maybe start a mating flight, but nothing has happened. This is my 3rd year of beekeeping, BTW. The really strange thing is that each night when I go out with a torch to close my hen house (between 8.00 and 10.00 pm) there are literally hundreds of bees clustered on the landing step in the dark - so many that you can't see the wood at all. This has been so for two weeks now, and if I saw this normally during a summer day I'd be convinced they were about to swarm - but it only happens when the sun goes down, and only since halfway through September. Some nights there are more, some nights fewer, but there is always quite a cluster. And, as I say, so far they haven't swarmed (and now the weather is cooling down a bit).

Any idea what they're doing? They have a brood and a super with about 4 full frames of honey in, they're still foraging very actively so I'm not feeding yet, and I thymolled them about ten days ago.

 

[Tom Bick]

Its the Thymol they dont like the smell

 

[Midland Beek]

If you were a bee, wouldn't you like the idea of hanging out on the front of a hive on a warm and humid night?

 

[AndreaW]

Mine did that with Apiguard, loads of bee beards until I stopped then back to normal again.

Glad to hear of someone else going out to lock up the chickens - bit of a routine now, go out lock up/open up chickens then check on what the bees are doing

 

[johnmcc]

I've seen a worker from that hive manoeuvring a lump of Apiguard out of the entrance a few days ago - it was a sphere about 3mm diameter which the bee was struggling with. I picked it up later and it took three days to get the smell from under my fingernails!

Good, thanks for the answers - basically I don't need to worry then.