What do mating flights look like?

[Otleybee]

I sat and watched a cast leaving my hive yesterday. My fault as I should have reduced the queen cells to one and not two.

As I watched the cast leaving it occured to me what does a queen leaving on a mating flight look like. Does she leave with a few attendants or does she take thousands with her who return to the hive once she has mated? How long is she gone for and how far does she go?

I caught the cast and united it with one of my weaker hives. Still hoping to get these new queens mated this early!

 

[RoofTops]

There is generally quite a lot of excitement when a queen takes a mating flight. From the work done by Jurgan Tauz experienced foragers and scouts will be flying around near the hive entrance waiting for the queen to emerge and they then take her to and from the drone congregation area. Mating flights have been mistake for swarms before but the number of bees involved is not in the thousands. My guess based on what I have seen would be not much more than a hundred, if that.

 

[Polyanwood]

The mating flight I saw made a different noise from a swarm. It was a different more low pitched buzz - my guess was that it was because there were quite a few drones accompanied the queen.