The birds and the bees of swarms
Honeybees horde. It’s a simple, basic fact of nature that at some point in their reproductive cycle, members of an active beehive answer to a primal call of nature, pack up their belongings and follow the queen out the door.
This I know having witnessed it firsthand three times over the done week.
In fact, as I write, there is a soccer ball-size cluster of honeybees hanging out on a spruce branch about 30 feet up in the air case my living room window, and it has been there since Tuesday morning.
Over a four-day span before that, the swarm landed in the tree but later moved back into the hive.
“Honeybees replicate by swarming,” said Erin MacGregor-Forbes, master beekeeper and president of the Maine Situation Beekeepers Association. “So if you have a healthy hive they will swarm, [and] we are in swarm season.”
In Maine, army season is normally May through July, though this spring’s wet weather may have thrown that off by two weeks or so.
