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zngmqk32
PostPosted: Wed 8:35, 13 Apr 2011 



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It is generally accepted that a colony of bees will not swarm until they have completed all of their brood combs, i.e. filled all available space with eggs,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych],[link widoczny dla zalogowanych] larvae and brood. This generally occurs in late Spring at a time when the other areas of the hive are rapidly filling with honey stores. So one key trigger of the swarming instinct is when the queen has no more room to lay eggs and the hive population is becoming very congested. Under these conditions a prime swarm may issue with the queen, resulting in a halving of the population within the hive, leaving the old colony with a large number of hatching bees. The queen who leaves finds herself in a new hive with no eggs and no larvae but lots of energetic young bees who create a new set of brood combs from scratch in a very short time.
Another important factor in swarming is the age of the queen. Those under a year in age are unlikely to swarm unless they are extremely crowded, while older queens have swarming predisposition.
Beekeepers monitor their colonies carefully in spring and watch for the appearance of queen cells, which are a dramatic signal that the colony is determined to swarm.
When a colony has decided to swarm, queen cells are produced in numbers varying to a dozen or more. When the first of these queen cells is sealed, after eight days of larval feeding, a virgin queen will pupate and be due to emerge seven days after sealing. Before leaving, the worker bees fill their stomachs with honey in preparation for the creation of new honeycombs in a new home. This cargo of honey also makes swarming bees less inclined to sting,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych] and a newly issued swarm is noticeably gentle for up to 24 hours a?? often capable of being handled without gloves or veil by a beekeeper.
All the time that the queen is fertile and laying eggs she produces a variety of pheromones which control the behavior of the bees in the hive; these are commonly called 'queen substance' but in reality there are various different pheromones with different functions. As the queen ages she begins to run out of stored sperm and her pheromones begin to fail. At some point, inevitably, the queen begins to falter and the bees will decide to replace her by creating a new queen from one of her worker eggs. They may do this because she has been damaged (lost a leg or an antenna),[link widoczny dla zalogowanych] because she has run out of sperm and cannot lay fertilized eggs (has become a 'drone laying queen') or because her pheromones have dwindled to a point where they cannot control all the bees in the hive anymore.


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