With May flowers in full bloom, bees are scouring their surroundings for nectar to bring back to their hive. But that didn’t turn out to be the case for amateur beekeeper Dennis Smith of Amherstview.
“Tuesday our bees decided to swarm and leave the hive,” Smith said.
Smith owns Loyalist Acres farm, but this is only his second summer as a beekeeper and he admits he’s no expert. While he was tending to his nearby farm on Tuesday he noticed something wasn’t quite right.
“I noticed a lot of activity in the air and bees were circling, Smith said. “Thousands of them. I knew right away what was going on. That it was a swarm and they were planning on leaving.”
Smith figures he lost about 20,000 bees when the swarm left its hive Tuesday.
But all is not lost. About 7,000 bees remain, he said, as well as a few queen cells which will develop in about eight to 10 days. Once that happens the population should rebound back to the numbers he had by the middle of the summer.
Doctor Nigel Raine is with the University of Guelph’s school of environmental sciences. He says bees swarming and leaving the hive is not uncommon.
“The honeybee colony senses that they’re running out of space in their hive or their nesting cavity and they start to raise new queens to help them support the swarming process,” Dr. Raine said on a Zoom call with Global News.
Once that happens, they leave, just the way Smith’s bees left earlier this week.
As for Smith, he says he’s been in touch with several apiaries in the past few days and has learned a lot more about bees since then.
At least now he’ll be better prepared to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
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