Ready For The Swarm!

About this episode

The episode discusses the preparation of honeybee colonies for summer and the processes involved in swarming and egg-laying.

Our local honeybee population is gearing up for the summer, and we are ready for them! We cleaned out our swarm boxes - evicting all the ants, spiders and mice that had moved in over the winter, and we rubbed the inside of each box with various attractants in hopes of catching a swarm. A healthy honeybee colony, with a summertime population of 50,000 bees, will winter over with only 15,000 workers and the queen. A third of that wintertime population won’t make it through to spring. As the weather warms up, the queen awakens from her torpor, and the surviving crew gets busy preparing for a new season of growth. The comb, now almost empty of the honey that sustained them through the winter, needs to be refurbished to the queen’s satisfaction so she can start laying eggs again. The worker bees will clean out each cell, smooth the walls and add a thin layer of propolis which acts as an antibacterial buffer for the eggs. The queen will not lay an egg in any cell until this step has been completed. Before laying, she puts her head inside the cell and measures it with her antennae. The size of the cell determines what kind of egg she lays. 90% of the cells in a hive are the correct size…

People in this episode

Host: Bobbie Emery

Topics covered

• honeybees
• swarming
• beekeeping
• nature
• seasonal changes

Keywords

• honeybee population
• swarm boxes
• queen bee
• worker bees
• drone cells

Mentioned in this episode

Products: honey, propolis

Places: Clatter Ridge Farm, winter, spring

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