I’m waiting for a swarm of bees.
If it happens, it will be quick. A kind of inverse tornado calmly and efficiently funneling themselves down, by the thousand, and in to the hive entrance. Up to twenty thousand of them. And it is done. The colony has reproduced.
Swarms begin when the workers in an existing hive decide it’s time to divide. The swarming instinct is the instinct to reproduce. The workers will raise a new queen. Half the colony stays in the old hive. Half leave. Each with a queen. The colony needs to reproduce. Or flee. So it swarms.
They will swarm because there is little space, or plentiful bees and food. Or because it is better to abandon a nest because of disease, poor conditions or disturbance to the nest. Bears, pine martens or clumsy beekeepers maybe. Or because the old queen is coming to a kind of end and the colony must continue. It is the most natural thing in the bee world. A swarm.
The swarm will hang out for a few days. Clumped up together on a tree branch, roofbeam, telegraph pole, wherever. Waiting. Watching. Scouting. Scout bees leave the swarm cluster looking for a likely home. They scent and search, evaluate likely options, report back to the hive. Over the course of a few days, they narrow down options. If your hive is an option, more and more scouts will visit. Scenting, assessing. In groups. Until, eventually, the queen is escorted in. Maybe to your hive. Bee democracy in action.
We have used this swarming trait to farm them for honey for thousands of years. But we are just hitchhikers on an evolutionary journey of theirs that far predates the history of our own species. Bees have swarmed for millions of years. We can follow the books to the letter, make perfect hives and still fail. As beekeepers like to say. Bees don’t read the books. We are riding on the coat tails of evolution. Dimly lighting the way to our own hive bodies.
So. I have four hives hung around the farm. More hung in the homes of friends and family. Each an optimistic investment of time, effort, and hope in bees and the farms future. If, in 5 years I have a business selling raw honey from NorthWest Ireland, the hope will have been well invested
Bees are many things to me. In some ways, bees are an apex species for the farm. A simple metric of how well I farm is the sound the hedgerow makes in summer as I pass by. If I hear the hum and roar of a thousand pollinators then I have farmed well. In other ways it’s a commercial concern. A way to diversify a small farm to maximise revenue per acre. A way to make our farming philosophy of sustainability, of no spray ramshackle wilderness pay it’s way.
Bees are also my mid life crisis. A way to prove to myself I can still learn, succeed and thrive at something complex, challenging and new. And I can do it in odd, unorthodox ways, using technologies, techniques and a farming philosophy that fits the farm. We’ll use Natural Beekeeping as our philosophy. Zero chemical medication for the bees, focusing instead on good habitat, good nutrition, farm biodiversity and good hive design to provide the bees with the strength and resources to build disease resistance for themselves, as they have evolved to do for aeons before we farmed them. Naturally. It’s also called Apicentric and Darwinian beekeeping. Give the bees what they need, use local wild bees, and, yes, you will lose some honeycrop. But you will have bees that evolve to overcome the challenges we have faced them with, rather than ones dependent on our medications to cope.
I’d like to think that, peeking into a hive, harvesting golden combs of honey, I will have a sense that the trees we plant, the wildflower seeds and clover we sow, the hedges we allow ramshackle dominion, the unshorn lawns, the spray free farming focus and the biodiversity we encourage will be expressed in the honey we jar. A far more elegant expression of the farmer ecology of my land than I could manage in mere words.
We are waiting for a swarm. A wild, unpredictable thing. The weather has been awful. Cold. Wet. The bees are hungry, unable to fly. Still. We wait. If there is one thing farming has it is optimism in the face of natural and unnatural levels of challenge and difficulty.
Good luck. Have you any advice on best place to put bait hives and size etc. We put a few hives about and even made a log hive and tthey always bugger off!!!
Im no expert.
But, bees like high up hives. And often orefer douth facing sites on the edge of woods or treelines, that are south facing. A little away from other hivrd csn be an advantage. They sometimes like to avoid competition. Line of sight is important, do being able to see the hive ckearly is good. And a little dappled shade is good. Some oeople swear by brightky coloured hives. Some dont.
None of the above is essential. Each might offer a little advantage. And people who trao swarms large scale often set up loke this. But they also say you can catch swarms in an old flowerpot thats sittimg in the doorstep. So the above might incrrase your probability, but its no guarsntee.
Ive ot done most of those, this year, but i will when ive preplanned fir next year.
Good luck!