What is a Honey Bee Swarm?

Understanding Honey Bee Swarms

If you've never had the chance to see a honey bee swarm here's your chance. Here's a bee swarm that landed in a backyard in Las Vegas, Nevada. The bees stuck around in the backyard for the night and took off the next morning, here is footage of them caught on camera before they took off. So what is a bee swarm? Swarming is the process bees go through when forming a new honey bee colony. This process happens when the queen bee leaves the bee colony with a large group of worker bees. In the prime swarm, about 60 percent of the worker bees will leave the original hive location with the old queen. This swarm of bees can contain thousands to tens of thousands of bees.

The Natural Cycle of Swarming

The sight of a group of swarming bees can certainly unnerve people. However, swarming bees is a very natural and amazing part of the life cycle of honey bees. There comes the point when the crowd in the hive is so great, that not all of the workers have access to the queen bee. The bees are no longer receiving the queen's pheromone signals, and so for them, she is non-existent. This induces within these worker bees the need to create a new honey bee queen. Before the new queen emerges, the old queen bee takes off with part of the bee colony to establish a new nest, but before leaving the original colony, all of the bees first need to fill themselves on nectar. The reason a bee swarm looks like a clump of bees is that all of the worker bees are gathered around the queen, hence forming a clump. But because the queen is not the strongest of flyers, she needs to rest at some point; this is when you see the swarm perhaps on a branch, post or fence. Meanwhile, Scout bees will be sent out to look for a suitable new place for the colony to live.

Beekeeping and Off-Grid Living

Anyone who is living in an off-grid house with solar power or a renewable energy source likely knows the importance of pollinating insects to help with their gardens, with bees for producing and collecting honey and for collecting wild berries. Beekeeping is a great idea for people who live in off-grid houses as they are a helpful addition to their homestead, along with helping the population of bees. With all the talk of bees disappearing homesteaders and others are turning to beekeeping on their properties to ensure that their crops aren't impacted by any of the regional bee die-offs.

Benefits of Beekeeping

If you are currently living an off-grid life on your homestead, beekeeping is certainly something you want to look into if you aren't already doing it. Not only does beekeeping help to make sure that you and the people in your area have an abundance of one of nature's most important pollinating insects, but beekeeping can also give you an in-demand revenue stream as well. Honey has always been a fairly popular and profitable commodity, and with more and more people turning towards natural sweeteners that are minimally processed, the demand for organic, quality, and locally sourced honey is probably at an all-time high.