There was something amiss in my back yard. It looked, from my third-story West End window, like there was a puddle of tar on the brick courtyard below. Except that I noticed it was undulating. And then, alarmed, I heard the collective buzz.
What I was witnessing on that late July afternoon last summer was a bee swarm. I didn’t yet know it, but swarms are a common phenomenon in which a mass of honeybees leaves a hive with its queen to establish a new colony. It is prompted by the colony’s instinct to reproduce, and in a bee yard, it can happen because of overcrowding and lack of space for the queen to lay eggs or threats from a predator or disease.
Though swarms usually peak in June on the Cape, they can happen anytime between spring and the end of summer, says Stone Dow of Barnstable, secretary of the Barnstable County Beekeepers Association (BCBA), which counts 400 members.
“It’s part of their reproductive process,” says Dow, who witnessed a swarm in late July. “They are just in search of a new home.”
And while swarming bees left alone will eventually move on, “especially if they’re exposed,” Dow says, the association encourages neighborly beekeeping, which means fetching a swarm before it decides to take shelter under the eaves of somebody’s house. To help with that, they recently partnered with an online platform called Swarmed (beeswarmed.org). There, anyone can file a detailed swarm report that will trigger a text alert to beekeepers, including about 15 on the Cape, who have registered to be swarm first responders.
Susan Troyan, who lives in Provincetown, is one of them. She discovered her passion for beekeeping after retiring from her surgery practice in Boston and taking classes at BCBA’s Bee School with her wife, Laurie Delmolino. They were captivated by how honeybees seem to dedicate themselves to the greater good.
“It’s all about survival of the hive,” says Troyan, who is now keeping three hives — with up to 60,000 bees each at their summer peak — in her yard. “It’s not about the individual but working together so that the hive survives.”
Sometimes that work leads to a swarm. And when it does, at least in Provincetown, Troyan and Delmolino are ready to respond, just as they did for me on that July afternoon last summer, when I told them about the buzzing mass in my courtyard and they quickly appeared in their heavy white beekeeper suits and veils.
The women knew the bees were their own, as they’d watched a colony split off a few days earlier, for reasons unknown, and swarm high up in another neighbor’s tree, refusing to be coaxed back into the apiary. The bees had then decamped to a fir tree in my courtyard.
Apparently delayed in finding a safe cavity in which to make a new home, the bees had begun building comb on the branch. A strong gust knocked the comb — and the queen — down to the ground. That’s the mass I’d seen in the courtyard: the queen with members of her colony congregating around her.
Collection methods vary. Often, a swarm, clustered tightly, drapes itself into a cone shape, in which case beekeepers can put a hive box right under it and either shake or clip the branch. If the queen is there, the others will follow. That happened once in the West End, creating what Troyan says was a “pretty swarm,” hanging down from an arbor.
In my courtyard, the beekeepers gently but firmly used a file folder to scrape the mass of bees into a spare hive box.
“If they’re out in the open, they’re in transition, so they’re not really defensive like they would be if they were establishing a home in a hive,” says Dow. That’s when “you can be creative and not worry as much about being stung.”
Sometimes beekeepers will even scoop them up with their bare hands, he says, but more challenging situations — like a recent swarm that burrowed in under the eaves of an 18-foot-tall Barnstable building — call for low-powered bee vacuums. Often, says Dow, swarms turn out to be yellowjackets or wasps; in those instances, exterminators are called in.
Troyan, like most beekeepers, does her best to prevent swarms, adding extra boxes to her hives as the population grows each spring.
Beekeepers also can stay ahead of a swarm and mimic it, says Dow, by splitting the bees and resources of one hive into two, keeping the original queen with one half and introducing a new queen that they’ve either purchased or raised to the other. “If they go long enough without a queen and there are eggs from a previous queen, then they’ll raise their own,” he says.
Still, “You can do everything right and still get a swarm,” says Troyan.
That’s just a reminder that nature cannot be controlled, writes Honeybee Democracy author Thomas Seeley in the foreword to the beekeeper’s guide Swarm Essentials: “As we watch the thousands and thousands of swarm bees tumbling from the hive, and then we stand in the midst of a cloud of bees swirling on every side, we can appreciate that honeybees are still untamed creatures, ones over which human beings have not totally triumphed.”
