Swift as the falcon's sweep, the monarch bends
Her flight abrupt: the following host descends;
Round the fine twig, like clustered grapes, they close
In thickening wreaths, and court a short repose."
As it often happens with after-swarms that more than one young queen is hatched before the start is made, the presence of these may cause irregular and puzzling behaviour in the bees. Langstroth mentions a case in which no less than eight queens must have started thus together, and Von Berlepsch once met with the same number; while Spitzner found a swarm with so many as twenty-one, but this happened fourteen days after the return to the hive of the first swarm, which had lost its queen. As mentioned in the section on "The Queen," it is not altogether a rare occurrence, though certainly the exception, for more than one monarch to settle down together. In one American case no fewer than five colonies once took up their quarters in a single large box, and remained there through a season "united yet divided."
If, on the contrary, the queen is not in the swarm at all, the bees sometimes return at once to the hive, and sometimes they first institute a search for her majesty. In the famous but cruel experiment of Dr. Warder a whole swarm was starved to death by alternate deprivations and restorations of their queen repeated at intervals during five days. Of course in his day this devotion was attributed to personal regard.
Exceptional cases of another kind are also not uncommon, in which a colony has made no preparation for swarming (by the formation of royal cells), but on the sudden arrival of warm weather it is enticed—Dzierzon says by the heat itself. Von Berlepsch by the contagious example of neighbouring hives—to carry out in a hurry that which ought to have received some ten days' preliminary care. "An internal revolution is made," says the Baron, "and they rush forth for the swarm. The queen, as becomes the pseudo-sovereign of a democratic monarchy, hastens to prove to her people their most obedient servant, and there the swarm is, hanging on the first convenient tree." On the following morning it will in such case be found that worker cells have been transformed into royal ones.
An instance illustrating the way in which bees sometimes make provision beforehand of a place to fly to when about to swarm came under our own notice a few years since. A lady who lived about a quarter of a mile from our apiary sent to us to say that a swarm had gone in at a hole over her stable, and to ask us to come and hive them. On our going to do so her gardener told us that he had seen three days previous two or three bees as if reconnoitring; next day several came, and about eleven o'clock on the third day the whole swarm went in and took up their position between the rafters under the flooring. The difficulty was now to get at them. A carpenter was sent for, the boards were taken up, a hive was set over, with a brood comb placed in it to attract them, and by dint of smoke and brushing with a feather, the queen and her retinue were coaxed to ascend into the hive. Some of the bees had already gone out to forage, and there were many flying about that had not settled; so to secure these and make it easy for them, we brought the hive out, and erected a sort of platform on a pair of steps close to the hole, which we stopped. By nighttime all the out-flying bees had joined the swarm and were easily removed.
We ought to mention that we recognised this swarm from the appearance of the bees as those from the Carniolan hive left under our care by the Rev. W. C. Cotton ([page 45]), and as the queen with the swarm was the original, we had to ask that we might be allowed to take the bees back if we provided a swarm of the ordinary English bees, which offer was accepted. Mr. Cotton eventually took this colony to his residence at Frodsham near Chester, and we kept the stock, which of course had a new queen. The bees did not long retain their distinctive features.
A swarm of bees, in a natural state, contains from 10,000 to 20,000 insects. "On an average," says Dzierzon, "we may call 20,000 a strong swarm, 12,000 to 15,000 a moderate one, and 6,000 to 8,000 a weak one." Von Berlepsch by a very careful experiment estimated that there were 5,600 unloaded bees in a pound, so that when loaded for swarming there would certainly not be more than 4,000. A good swarm will therefore weigh from three to five pounds. We have known swarms not heavier than two pounds and a half that were in very excellent condition in August as regards store for the winter; though the Baron's experiments showed with remarkable conformity that for a new swarm six pounds was proportionally more profitable than any other weight, larger or smaller. For a fully furnished hive, he states, there seems really no limit but that of space—the more bees the better.