Swarm

Definition

Triggered by congestion combined with abundant forage. The colony builds queen cells, workers reduce the queen's feeding so she is light enough to fly, and on a warm day she leaves with roughly half to two-thirds of the workers. The swarm settles nearby in a cluster while hundreds of scout bees search for a cavity and advertise candidates by dancing on the cluster's surface — a genuine collective decision that converges on one site over hours or days. A prime swarm contains the old queen; smaller later casts contain virgin queens.

Where the word gets used loosely

Widely feared and almost entirely harmless. A swarm has no brood, no stores and no cavity to defend, and the bees gorge on honey before leaving, which makes them physically less able and less inclined to sting. The correct response is to keep a sensible distance, not spray it with anything, and call a local beekeeping association — most will collect it free.

Honey records that discuss this

• Tupelo honeyButtery and clean with a pear-and-green-apple lift, and a long soft finish that never turns cloying.
• Sugarbag honeySharply tangy and fruity with a resinous edge — often described as lemon-and-caramel, and quite unlike honey bee honey in every respect.
• Silver fir honeyMalty, resinous and barely sweet, with a balsamic depth and a long woody finish. One of the least sugary honeys there is.

Bee records that discuss this

• Western honey beeThe bee behind essentially all the world's honey, and the one most people mean when they say 'bee'. Apis mellifera is a perennial eusocial insect that overwinters as a living cluster rather than dying back each year — which is the whole reason it stores honey in quantity, and therefore the reason it was ever domesticated. It is native to Europe, Africa and western Asia and has been carried by people to every continent except Antarctica.
• Africanized honey beeThe most misreported animal in this catalogue. Africanized honey bees are ordinary western honey bees with African ancestry, and they differ from European stock in degree rather than in kind: they respond to disturbance faster, commit more workers to defence, and pursue an intruder further. They are not more venomous, they do not hunt people, and they make perfectly good honey. The name that stuck to them came from a 1970s press cycle, and it has outlived every attempt to correct it.
• Plasterer beesSolitary ground-nesting bees that line their cells with a self-produced plastic. A female Colletes paints the walls of each cell with a secretion applied by her short forked tongue, which polymerises into a transparent, waterproof, cellophane-like membrane — a genuine biological polyester, and one of the most remarkable materials any insect makes. It waterproofs the cell against the damp sandy ground these bees prefer.
• Red-tailed bumblebeeA striking black bumblebee with a bright orange-red tail, and one of the most recognisable insects in a European summer. The queens are large, entirely velvet-black except for the tail, and the males are quite different animals to look at — smaller, with bright yellow facial hair and yellow bands that lead people to report two species where there is one.
• Italian honey beeThe most widely kept honey bee subspecies in the world, and the golden-banded bee most people picture when they think of one. Italian bees were exported from the Ligurian valleys from the mid nineteenth century and now underpin commercial beekeeping across the Americas, Australasia and much of Europe — chosen for gentleness, prolific brood rearing and a strong disinclination to swarm.
• Carniolan honey beeThe second most widely kept honey bee subspecies, and the one most European beekeepers choose over Italian stock. Carniolans come from the eastern Alps and the Balkans, and they are adapted to a short intense season: explosive spring build-up, rapid contraction in a dearth, frugal winter consumption — and a swarming instinct that gives beekeepers more work than any other trait.
• Iberian honey beeThe honey bee of Spain and Portugal, and one of the more genetically interesting subspecies in Europe — it carries ancestry from both the western European dark bee lineage and the African lineage across the Strait of Gibraltar, in a gradient running from north to south. It is defensive, frugal, prone to swarming, and superbly adapted to a landscape of long dry summers.
• Buckfast beeA honey bee breed rather than a subspecies, created at Buckfast Abbey in Devon by Brother Adam over roughly seventy years from the 1920s onwards. He travelled extensively collecting stock from across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and bred deliberately for gentleness, productivity, disease resistance and low swarming. The result is one of the most widely kept bees in Europe and a genuinely unusual piece of animal breeding.
• Vernal colletesA large spring plasterer bee that emerges in March for willow catkins and forms some of the most spectacular nesting aggregations in northern Europe — tens of thousands of burrows in a single dune slope, with clouds of males patrolling above them waiting for females to emerge.