Thousands of bees - often as many as seventy thousand - live together in one hive. In summer, when the hive becomes too overcrowded, some of the bees prepare to take their queen and start a new home in another place where they will have more room. But bees are not like people. In the bee world it is the older ones who leave the home to begin a new family life. The queen must go with them to lay eggs so there will be new workers for the new home. Yet the old hive needs a queen, too, and so the bees plan ahead by building several queen cells and feeding and nursing the baby queens inside the cells. Then, just a day or two before it is time for the queen bees to hatch, the bees who are going to leave - often about half the bees in the hive - fly out with their queen. This is called "swarming. "

The Swarming Bees Cling Together in a Thick Cluster

First each bee that is leaving provides herself with a load of honey, so that she will have enough to eat until a new home is found. Then the bees rush out of the hive, tumbling over one another in their excitement to be off. Once outside, they swarm through the air in a whirling cloud, making a loud humming noise.

After a while the queen settles somewhere, perhaps on the limb of a tree. Most of the bees join her, and they all cling together in a thick cluster which often looks like a big bunch of grapes. They wait here while a few bees go off to hunt for a new home.

The scouts may be gone only an hour or two, or it may take them a day or more to find a suitable place. This may be a partly dead tree or an empty space between the walls of a house, or some other place where they will have plenty of room and where they will be protected from bad weather. When the scouts come back to the swarming bees, they show them the way to the new home.

Bees are gentle when swarming, and a beekeeper can easily catch them by shaking them into a box or bag. Then the bees may find that their new home is a hive filled with empty frames. The beekeeper will empty the whole mass of perhaps twenty or thirty thousand bees into the hive, or he may dump the bees on a board which slants up from the ground to the entrance of the hive. If the queen should not be left with them, the bees will not stay, but will fly back to

The Beekeeper Dumps the Bees onto a Slanting Board their old hive. But if their queen is still safely with them, they will march like a little army up the board into the new hive. There they will start building their combs at once, and soon the new home will be almost as full of honey and baby bees as the old one was when they left it.