Think family, not insects
A honey bee colony behaves less like a crowd of bugs and more like one big creature. In summer a healthy hive can hold somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 bees, and almost all of them are daughters of a single mother: the queen. The species most beekeepers keep is Apis mellifera, the western honey bee.
The three kinds of bee
- The queen. Not a ruler. More like the colony's egg-laying engine. At her peak she can lay well over a thousand eggs a day. She smells unique, and that smell tells everyone the family is okay.
- Workers. All female, and they do literally everything else: cleaning, feeding babies, building wax, guarding the door, and finally flying out for nectar and pollen. A summer worker lives roughly six weeks and mostly works herself out.
- Drones. The males. No sting, no chores. Their one job is mating with a queen from another colony. When autumn comes and food gets tight, the workers push them out. Harsh, but practical.
"A hive isn't run by the queen. It's run by a very busy committee of her daughters."
Our notebook, spring entry
How bees tell each other where the food is
When a forager finds a great patch of flowers, she comes home and dances. Literally. She runs in a figure-of-eight and waggles her body along the middle bit. The angle of that waggle relative to straight up tells her sisters the direction compared with the sun, and how long she waggles hints at the distance. The Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch worked this out, and it was part of why he shared the Nobel Prize in 1973. It's called the waggle dance, which is, for once, exactly what it sounds like.
Swarming: the big move
This is the one that worries new beekeepers. When a colony feels crowded and strong, usually in late spring, the workers raise new queens. Just before the first one hatches, the old queen leaves with roughly half the bees. That cloud of bees is a swarm. It often hangs in a clump on a branch while scouts look for a new home.
A swarm isn't an attack. Swarming bees are full of honey and usually very gentle, because they have no home to defend. If you'd like the full story, Thomas D. Seeley's book Honeybee Democracy explains how the scouts "vote" on a new address. It's a genuinely gripping read.
For you, though, a swarm means half your bees and most of your honey hopes just flew off. So in spring, beekeepers check every week or so for queen cells (peanut-shaped wax cups hanging from the comb) and give the colony more room or split it into two before it decides to go.
The yearly rhythm
Spring is the busy season: the colony grows fast and swarming risk peaks. Summer is about collecting nectar. Autumn is when bees shrink their numbers and pack the larder. In winter they cluster into a ball and shiver to keep warm, slowly eating their honey. Knowing which chapter your colony is in tells you what to do, and often the answer is "not much".