05/23/2026
After my video last week with the swarms on the disk, one of my followers asked why bees do this? Here is my explanation of why bees swarm: Swarming is the way honeybees reproduce on the colony level. Let's say you and your family live in an apartment building, you cannot add on, so eventually you outgrow it. So, the old queen (the mom) and about half the workers (older working kids) leave to start a new colony. So now your family will have 2 apartment buildings. The bees that leave exit the hive and usually cluster close by. This is what is going on in my videos. While they are clustered, some of the workers are flying throughout the neighborhood looking for a hollow cavity to start the new colony. Once a scout bee finds an acceptable location she goes back to the cluster and does a waggle dance to tell other scout bees to check her location out. Once enough scout bees like the location, and they are all dancing about the same location, the cluster of bees will take to the air in a large swirling cloud of bees and fly to the location to start a new colony. Meanwhile back at the old colony, before the bees left, they started raising new queens to take over, they do not raise just 1 new queen but many. The first one to emerge tries to go around to kill any other new queens. Sometimes many queens emerge at the sometime and this can lead to additional swarms. In the video the large swarm was probably the initial swarm and the smaller one a secondary swarm. Bees swarm in the spring so they have all summer to build all the new comb and store enough honey to get through the winter so next spring this process starts all over.