Swarming; how is the hive split?

[wood blewit]

one of my hives swarmed last week and the curious thing was that although there were thousands of bees flying about in swarm mode there was still serious bee traffic going to and from the hive as though these bees were oblivious to the rest that were swarming,, and what an amazing sight a swarm of bees is.

 

[drstitson]

"The nation has now branded you a 'sexist moron' a la John Inverdale."

why? - he made no reference to gender, just physical appearance

 

[beeno]

"The nation has now branded you a 'sexist moron' a la John Inverdale."

why? - he made no reference to gender, just physical appearance

Hi drstitson,
Now, you are on a very slippery slope! Firstly, the word Doorman and secondly the greatest population in a beehive are female. Phone up your local council they will put you right
This accounts for humour where I come from.

 

[Travelator]

My question is this. What is the mechanism by which this split is decided? In other words, how is it decided which bees will leave the hive, and how is it decided enough bees have left?

Established science doesn't know the answer and I certainly don't know any better, but I know of an interesting starting point for some experiments - namely the Taranov Board (see Dave Cushman's site for a good description)

Brief summary is that a Taranov Board creates an artificial swarm by selecting bees that would rather stay close to the queen and rejecting ones that are willing to fly across a small gap to get back to their home. Would be interesting to find a way of showing whether the same mechanism is at work in a natural swarm.

 

[Finman]

Established science doesn't know the answer and I certainly don't know any better, but I know of an interesting starting point for some experiments - namely the Taranov Board (see Dave Cushman's site for a good description)

Brief summary is that a Taranov Board creates an artificial swarm by selecting bees that would rather stay close to the queen and rejecting ones that are willing to fly across a small gap to get back to their home. Would be interesting to find a way of showing whether the same mechanism is at work in a natural swarm.

That has nothing to do with swarming. Shook swarm is not a swarm. They are just bees which have dropped from frames.
. Those return to home which have localized the hive site.

When a real swarm leave the hive, they forget the hive site.
Even if they return to home, they have forgotten it. If you do an AS just afpter returning, bees will not return to the old site. They stay in new site. In shook swarm all old bees return to the old site.

 

[oliver90owner]

But it looks like nearly every bee initially leaves the hive

Noted elsewhere, but not the most clever statement. Check out at what age proff seeley reckons bees start to fly. That might mean that up to ten percent of the colony suddenly abandon all the brood and fly off before they have previously even left the hive or got to the stage of being airworthy?

Needs a bit more thought than that. Does all foraging cease on the day of the swarm? If not, what happens to those bees out foraging?

We know that large numbers of bees are idle before the swarming date - those that recognise or notice these 'pre-swarming' indicators would agree, I hope. So who is to say that the leavers are not mainly pre-determined and a lot of other bees are just carried out with the rush, to return soon after. There would, of course, be some border-line cases of bees that might or might not go and so would 'change' their minds or be a bit undecided.

Bees are simple creatures but as a super organism certainly not stupid. Think here, also, of ants, where the flying ants all leave umpteen nests, in the same area, at around about the same time. Not just pure luck, or is it?

 

[Finman]

.
There are no exact numbers, what age are the bees.
At the beginning of summer all bees in colony are new because build up history is such. When foragers emerged, brood frames were 4 and now 12 brood frames push out new bees.
In the middle of summer the hive has quite big percentage of foragers and the swarm structure is different.
Foragers have born from those 12 frames.

And what then even if you know the structure correctly? What do you do eith that knowledge? After 2 weeks bees age have changed and after 2 months they are dead.

 

[Finman]

But it looks like nearly every bee initially leaves the hive

Noted elsewhere, but not the most clever statement. Check out at what age proff seeley reckons bees start to fly. is it?

No sense in that that all bees leave the hive.
Hive is still full of larvae and brood. Who feed the larvae and who heat the hive then. What a waste if mother colony dies and is rotten.

It is enough to know that about half of bees leave with swarm. Then during next week new bees are emerged and hive can do the second swarm. If it is not able, it destroys the extra queen cells. In most cases of AS brood have lost so much bees that it does not make cast.