swarm chasing

[RoseCottage]

Linn and I have been away celebrating our first wedding anniversary. We got home mid afternoon to find the house locked but left just like the Marie Celeste.
We then got a frantic call from our daughter who said she was with a swarm and needed our help.

Alice had taken a nuc box with sugar syrup frames and placed it next to the swarm. She did not know to shake them into an empty box.

We dashed to the location but when we arrived she told us that they had just flown away. They were in a low hedge when someone told her of them.
There were still a hundred or so bees in the hedge. They had just left and flown over a line of trees some hundred yards away. To where no-one knows...
Linn and I have walked the field boundaries (mainly rape fields with trees and hedge mix) but no sign of them. Apparently the ball in the hedge was big about the size of a football and a half. The cloud had homeowners talking of Dr who and the noise was deafening...

What should we do next? Is there anything?

All the best,
Sam

 

[Midland Beek]

Happy anniversary. I'd look inside your hives to see if they were your bees.

 

[YorkshireBees]

Its sad but if you can't find them initially you generally don't, in my experience.

I had to watch one of my swarms (own hive) leave across the fields last year, I lost sight of them so couldn't follow.

 

[Erichalfbee]

Errrrrrr just as an aside, does a swarm fly en masse or do they spread out a bit? Probably a daft question. Sorry

 

[Mike a]

Bee Swarms Follow High-Speed 'Streaker' Bees To Find A New Nest
ScienceDaily (Nov. 24, 2008)

It's one of the hallmarks of spring: a swarm of bees on the move. But how a swarm locates a new nest site when less than 5% of the community know the way remains a mystery. Curious to find out how swarms cooperate and are guided to their new homes, Tom Seeley, a neurobiologist from Cornell University, and engineers Kevin Schultz and Kevin Passino from The Ohio State University teamed up to find out how swarms are guided to their new home.

According to Schultz there are two theories on how swarms find the way. In the 'subtle guide' theory, a small number of scout bees, which had been involved in selecting the new nest site, guide the swarm by flying unobtrusively in its midst; near neighbours adjust their flight path to avoid colliding with the guides while more distant insects align themselves to the guides' general direction. In the 'streaker bee' hypothesis, bees follow a few conspicuous guides that fly through the top half of the swarm at high speed.
Schultz explains that Seeley already had still photographs of the streaks left by high-speed bees flying through a swarm's upper layers, but what Seeley needed was movie footage of a swarm on the move to see if the swarm was following high-velocity streakers or being unobtrusively directed by guides. Passino and Seeley decided to film swarming bees with high-definition movie cameras to find out how they were directed to their final destination.
But filming diffuse swarms spread along a 12·m length with each individual on her own apparently random course is easier said than done. For a start you have to locate your camera somewhere along the swarm's flight path, which is impossible to predict in most environments. The team overcame this problem by relocating to Appledore Island, which has virtually no high vegetation for swarms to settle on. By transporting large colonies of bees, complete with queen, to the island, the team could get the insects to swarm from a stake to the only available nesting site; a comfortable nesting box. Situating the camera on the most direct route between the two sites, the team successfully filmed several swarms' chaotic progress at high resolution.
Back in Passino's Ohio lab, Schultz began the painstaking task of analysing over 3500 frames from a swarm fly-by to build up a picture of the insects' flight directions and vertical position. After months of bee-clicking, Schultz was able to find patterns in the insects' progress. For example, bees in the top of the swarm tended to fly faster and generally aimed towards the nest, with bees concentrated in the middle third of the top layer showing the strongest preference to head towards the nest.
Schultz also admits that he was surprised at how random the bees' trajectories were in the bottom half of the swarm, 'they were going in every direction,' he says, but the bees that were flying towards the new nest generally flew faster than bees that were heading in other directions; they appeared to latch onto the high-speed streakers. All of which suggests that the swarm was following high-speed streaker bees to their new location.


Story Source: Click Here
The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by The Journal of Experimental Biology, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS. The original article was written by Kathryn Phillips.
Journal Reference:
Schultz, K. M., Passino, K. M. and Seeley, T. D. The mechanism of flight guidance in honeybee swarms: subtle guides or streaker bees? The Journal of Experimental Biology, October 3, 2008, 211, 3287-3295

 

[terryme]

Wow, that's fascinating thanks.

 

[RoofTops]

Fascinating, but to answer the original question, what can you do? Nothing, they have almost certainly set up a new home somewhere. When the bees first emerge in the swarm they normally cluster close to the hive and then scout bees go out to find more permanent quarters. When they have found a possible site they do a waggle dance on the outside of the cluster to enlist more bees to invesigate what they have found. At some point a committee decision is reached and they all up sticks and depart - flying as described above.

The bees are now probably in someone's chimney or a hole in a wall or tree.

A bait hive might have worked, but too late now.

 

[Erichalfbee]

RoofTops, you are a mine of information

 

[RoseCottage]

Thanks for all your thoughts. The bees swarmed from someone's old abandoned hives in some woods we think and we almost had them.

Sadly not able to locate or get to the source but have been told they are out there.

Next time...next time..


Sam