The Swarm!

Nothing, and I mean nothing, says, "Welcome guests!" like a swarm of angry bees right by your back door!  A few weeks ago I showed you that we have a colony of bees that live in the column that supports the overhang by the side entrance to our house.  Well, last week they were swarming all over the place.  You couldn't even go outside on this side of the house.  The neighbor came and rang the doorbell Saturday morning and never saw them.  We came to the door and didn't want to open it, but gestured frantically to look up.  He did and ran quickly back to his house.  Amazingly, he didn't get stung.

Angry bees

Let's zoom in and take a closer look:



Bee careful!

I actually like having the bees around as they are helping pollinate our fruit trees, vegetables, and flowers.  But I wish they'd move somewhere else.  The photo doesn't do justice to the sheer amount of bees flying around.

Fortunately, I don't have an allergic reaction to bee stings, but they kind of creep me out.  I remember as a kid watching a movie on TV about Killer Bees.  I remember they eventually coerced them into the Superdome in New Orleans, turned down the air conditioner to 45 degrees in the Superdome to immobilize the bees and the crisis was averted.  Well, these aren't killer bees, thankfully.

So what were the bees doing?  Well, according to Wikipedia (Source): There is a time in early Spring where bees swarm.  This swarming is called supercedure.  The queen will lay eggs in queen cups.  The queen larva is fed royal jelly (a protein rich secretion from the heads of young worker bees).  If not fed royal jelly, the queen larva would have become a worker bee.  As a result of eating exclusively royal jelly, the queen develops into a sexually mature female.  Queens have special cells on the hive that are larger and are vertically oriented instead of horizontal.  As the young queen larva pupates, the workers cap the cell with beeswax until the virgin queen chews her way out.

During swarming season, the old queen will likely leave with the prime swarm before the first virgin queen emerges from a queen cell.  This is what I think was happening at our house.  When the young queen emerges, she'll look for all the rival virgin queens and kill them and any unemerged queens.  How nice of her! 

After the main swarm has left, the workers in the colony may prevent virgins from fighting and one or several virgins may go with after-swarms. Other virgins may stay behind with the remnant of the hive. As many as 21 virgin queens have been counted in a single large swarm. When the after-swarm settles into a new home, the virgins will then resume normal behavior and fight to the death until only one remains. If the prime swarm has a virgin queen and the old queen, the old queen will usually be allowed to live. The old queen continues laying. Within a couple of weeks she will die a natural death and the former virgin, now mated, will take her place.  Unlike the worker bees, the queen's stinger is not barbed. The queen can sting repeatedly without dying.

Very interesting.  I learned something.  I learned that I don't want all this violence right outside our door, so-o-o-o...   Last night, when the bee activity calmed down, I snuck (is snuck a word?) up on them and sprayed the big ball of bees with some roach spray as I didn't have any Wasp & Hornet spray on hand.  You can see the carnage below on the sidewalk leading up to the side entrance.


Bee carcasses

Now, before anyone from PETOB (People for the ethical treatment of bees) objects, I didn't kill the beehive in the column - just the swarm that was causing trouble.  There are still bees carrying on as usual, going in and out of the column, not bothering anyone.  For the time being, there is PEACE on our little farm - a land flowing with MILK & HONEY(literally).