4. Great balls of bees

So, we all know about bee swarms.  Dangerous, right?  Actually they're not - the bees in a swarm are newly gorged on a hive's honey store so they're having a sugar rush and are in a remarkably good mood (yes, bees do have moods) as long as you don't run over them with a lawnmower.  What's interesting about a swarm is that it is, in fact, a caucus in which the bees collectively think, debate and make decisions about what to do next.

Don't believe it?  Well, I'll tell you what happens and you can tell me (in a comment or whatever) whether that counts as thinking, debating and deciding together.

Swarming is how a colony reproduces itself.  When the bees in a hive or nest start to outgrow their home, they get restless and make preparations for just over half of them to up sticks and find a new one.  When the swarm leaves the hive with the old queen, the remaining workers have to grow a new one.  First, they find eggs laid by the old queen in the hive's cells, then make some of those cells bigger and douse the eggs with royal jelly to make sure the larvae in those cells turn into new queen bees.

Sometimes, the swarm is initiated not by the old queen but by a new, unmated (virgin) queen.  As soon as she emerges from her cell the drama begins, for she gives off a follow-me pheromone.  The old queen doesn't like this so much (does this sound familiar?) and she'll try to find the young queen and fight her.  Meanwhile, the new queen starts rushing around the other bees to canvass their support.  She does this by making a piping sound at a perfect G# pitch.  No, you don't believe that either, but here it is happening, and it's always G#.  If this works and she doesn't bump into the other queen along the way then the older bees in the colony will tell her that it's time to swarm.

Just before swarming, the bees raid the honey supply to take on as much energy as possible because they won't be eating again for a day or two, then they go.  Between a half and two-thirds of the bees will leave the hive with their queen.

If anyone out there has seen the 1970s B-movie Swarm when bees take over Houston, get into the air conditioning and kill everyone, please don't be alarmed.  In fact, the swarming bees just fly around energetically for a bit and then gather on a branch or somesuch just a few yards away from the old hive.  They might gather into a big ball and hang from the branch, which is all thanks to the prodigious effort of a single bee, which holds the whole ball with one leg and hangs on to the branch for dear life with another leg.  Surprisingly the bee does not fall in half but it does look like a thankless job.

So why do the bees do this?  The startling truth is that they have things to discuss and they all need to be near each other so they can talk and listen.  But first, a handful of scouts, said to be the best foragers in the colony, fly off looking for a suitable new home.  It's not easy.  They need a large, reasonably weather-proof space, free from ants and other vexations.  The process can take a day or two, during which time the bees are highly vulnerable to a cold snap, predators and starvation.  Even a hard shower of rain would finish them off, but if all goes well, the scouts will start returning.

Independently the scouts tell their story.  By dancing, they communicate the quality, distance and direction of the space they have found.  If they shake vigorously, for example, that means it's a really good one; if they walk a long way across the surface of the swarm ball, then that says it's a long way away; and so on.  The bees wait to see what all the scouts have to say.  The scouts listen to each other, too, and fly off to check out each other's finds until soon most of them are all raving about the same few places.  If a scout is promoting an inferior site, other scouts might headbutt the errant bee which takes the jazz out of her dance - it's their way of saying 'Sshhh!'  So the process goes on.  Tthe scouts keep going and coming and shaking and dancing and listening and headbutting and ssshing, until a near-consensus begins to emerge on a single location.  It's not usually a full consensus because the bees don't have long enough, but they do wait until there's enough of a consensus to act.  This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, for in order to survive they must balance the need to find a new home quickly with the need to make sure it's of high quality.

When the bees have decided, they fly off to make their new home.

I saw a swarm just today in London so you could, too.  Some people will catch a swarm and destroy it as a nuisance - they don't realise they're watching the bees' parliament in session.

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