Swarming; how is the hive split?

[PeteD]

Hello there.

I'm not a beekeeper, but I have a question I have not been able to find an answer for.

Whenever swarming occurs, the hive splits; roughly half (according to most sources I've been able to find) the bees follow the old queen out, the rest remain in the old hive.

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?

 

[oliver90owner]

Age old practise. They ought to know by now after millions of years experience. Those that got it wrong are no longer in the gene pool?

 

[PeteD]

Age old practise. They ought to know by now after millions of years experience. Those that got it wrong are no longer in the gene pool?

Evolution did not determine any bee's individual choice, it determined the mechanism by which a bee makes the choice. My question is what the mechanism is.

 

[Apple]

Evolution did not determine any bee's individual choice, it determined the mechanism by which a bee makes the choice. My question is what the mechanism is.

Evolution...

Thankfully there are still many questions, the answer will probably be 42, but then Deep Thought had the incorrect information programmed in!

Does anyone know?

Maybee the "Doorman" says...............
your pretty stay in........
your Ugly get out!

This passes for humour in South Devon!
Before Admin bans me for derisory comments!!!!

James

 

[wheeler]

Hi
Winston in 'The Biology of the Honey bee' states that 'worker age is the major factor determining which workers will remain in the nest and which will issue with both prime and ..casts ..' he gives references of (butler,1940; meyer,1956 and winston & otis, 1978)

Thomas Seeley might have more detailed research on the mechanism but I'm not sure.
(He's very good on the mechanism of where the swarm goes).
Cheers

 

[Ely]

Hello there.

I'm not a beekeeper, but I have a question I have not been able to find an answer for.

Whenever swarming occurs, the hive splits; roughly half (according to most sources I've been able to find) the bees follow the old queen out, the rest remain in the old hive.

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?

Bees are still being heavily researched to answer questions such as these. I'm not sure anyone has a scientifically correct answer. A flock of starlings when flying together in a swarm appear to be thinking with the same mind. However, it was discovered that they just observe what the rest of the swarm is doing and because they can react xamount of times quicker than a human mind can react to something, it appears to be in unison. I wouldn't be surprised if a honey bee swarm wasn't a million miles away from that.

Insects are not capable of decision making on a deep thinking level. People often describe honey bees as intelligent or clever, the way they have evolved is certainly clever, but not the individual bee, they are not thinking on a concious level, they are not self aware about what they are doing. It is purely instinctive, reacting to the environment. For those that wish to argue about whether insects are capable of deep thought or have feelings, ask yourselves why the human brain evolved to the size it did, and how complex it is.

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

For those that wish to argue about whether insects can 'think', ask yourselves why the human brain evolved to the size it did, and how complex it is.

And why, when the top light of the window is open, they keep bouncing off the glass? as evidenced by the hundreds of little bee corpses scattered around my office at the moment (passing swarm last week whilst I was away!)

 

[Pete D]

Hello there.

Hello PeteD,
all the best
Pete D

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

Yerrs - I did notice, thought you might have OD'd on the coffee this morning until I checked out the avatar

 

[PeteD]

Bees are still being heavily researched to answer questions such as these. I'm not sure anyone has a scientifically correct answer.

That's not unexpected. The sheer lack of information on the subject (at least in freely searchable literature I've seen) seems to agree.

A flock of starlings when flying together in a swarm appear to be thinking with the same mind. However, it was discovered that they just observe what the rest of the swarm is doing and because they can react xamount of times quicker than a human mind can react to something, it appears to be in unison. I wouldn't be surprised if a honey bee swarm wasn't a million miles away from that.

Bees have more methods of communication available to them than starlings, so it wouldn't surprise me if it was significantly more complicated. What's interesting is the way bees appear to reach consensus organically, and so quickly. From what I understand, though there is a lot of work that goes into swarming, the actual departure is quite sudden.

Insects are not capable of decision making on a deep thinking level. People often describe honey bees as intelligent or clever, the way they have evolved is certainly clever, but not the individual bee, they are not thinking on a concious level, they are not self aware about what they are doing. It is purely instinctive, reacting to the environment.

Agreed. Hence my interest.

It's unfortunate if it's unknown, but hey, if everything was known scientists would have nothing left to do. Thanks for the response.

 

[PeteD]

Hello PeteD, all the best. Pete D

And here I had all but ruled out the existence of an evil twin! Hello

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

And here I had all but ruled out the existence of an evil twin! Hello

Not evil - just a bit simple

 

[alanf]

...The sheer lack of information on the subject (at least in freely searchable literature I've seen) seems to agree...

One place to start is Tom Seeley and his book Honeybee Democracy. Not free, but there are libraries. There's at least one lecture on youtube [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnnjY823e-w"]Tom Seeley: Honeybee Democracy - YouTube[/ame] that covers some of his work on swarming. The lecture, and other work by him tends to concentrate on how and why the bees choose the sites for the colony. Less detail about the mechanism of deciding who stays/goes as I recall it. There may be some references in the book, I don't have it to hand to check.

 

[PeteD]

Thanks for this.

 

[PeteD]

For those who are interested, I asked professor Seeley at Cornell this question. I'll paraphrase his response:

We don't know the answer.

But it looks like nearly every bee initially leaves the hive, and then some return. Professor Seeley suspects there is an equilibration process that produces the right splitting pattern.

That is to say, if a bee leaves and sees few bees clustered around the queen, she's inclined to cluster around the queen (and thus become part of the swarm), and if she returns to the hive and finds too few bees there, she'll stay.

Perhaps this is of interest to some of you.

 

[beeno]

Evolution...

Thankfully there are still many questions, the answer will probably be 42, but then Deep Thought had the incorrect information programmed in!

Does anyone know?

Maybee the "Doorman" says...............
your pretty stay in........
your Ugly get out!

This passes for humour in South Devon!
Before Admin bans me for derisory comments!!!!

James

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

 

[alldigging]

The wax building abilities of swarms would indicate a number of bees who are ready and able to produce wax.
The ability to 'rehome' would indicate not older bees too.

 

[alanf]

The wax building abilities of swarms would indicate a number of bees who are ready and able to produce wax.
The ability to 'rehome' would indicate not older bees too.

The tricky bit is to work out how you monitor the age spread of the bees in the swarm. To an extent you can tell the age of a bee by some anatomical features, development of wax glands and so on. But that doesn't tell you if swarm behaviour is distorting the development and maybe prolonging the period when the bee can produce wax. There's nothing like counting rings somewhere to see how many days since they were an egg for instance.

If anyone has a way to work out the age of each bee in a sample I'm sure there are researchers out there who would like to know. Marking each bee as it emerges is rather labour intensive. In a lab context, you might try something like including radioactive compounds in the food source, residual radioactivity tells you how long ago they were fed the source. By the way, that's not going to get past the controls of dosing radioactivity to an open population.

 

[beeno]

For those who are interested, I asked professor Seeley at Cornell this question. I'll paraphrase his response:

We don't know the answer.

But it looks like nearly every bee initially leaves the hive, and then some return. Professor Seeley suspects there is an equilibration process that produces the right splitting pattern.

That is to say, if a bee leaves and sees few bees clustered around the queen, she's inclined to cluster around the queen (and thus become part of the swarm), and if she returns to the hive and finds too few bees there, she'll stay.

Perhaps this is of interest to some of you.

Hi Pete,
Yes, I have noticed the two way traffic between first swarm stop and hive. Also, that there is Nasonov fanning at the hive entrance to try to entice bees back. I don't agree from what I have seen that all the bees leave the hive and then some return scenario.
All very interesting!

 

[Teemore]

I was under the impression that bees preparing to swarm reactivated their wax glands, the slight decline in activity of a hive a few days prior to swarming being linked to some of the older workers reactivating their wax glands. Have a read at this: http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rc...Bpn8hzeqC7Zh6LzPDFnGjUQ&bvm=bv.69620078,d.ZGU