The Swarm
In early summer when the season is favorable for the storing of honey, the bees prosper and their hive is soon "boiling over" with occupants.
The home is now too small for the multitude, and the queen-mother, hearing the piping of a young queen, instead of executing her, gives and bequeaths to her all of the brood comb, honey comb, unhatched young, indoor bees and present stores, and taking nothing with her but a great mass of her loyal subjects sallies forth to found a new house. The foragers that happen to be abroad when the exodus takes place remain with the young queen and help her build up the fortunes of her family.
Sometimes a second swarm leaves soon after the first, with which goes the young queen, leaving a still younger one, or, it may be, one of the same age to attend to home affairs. When the colony is prosperous and swarming active, the bees do not allow the queens to kill each other. Sometimes as many as three swarms are cast in one season from the same hive, and even more; indeed, we hear of as many as eleven having gone from a hive in Carolina. These new swarms each cast one or more, so that the astonished owner finished the season with twentytwo swarms, while a number more had escaped, as he had no hives in which to put them.
Swammerdam tells an equally remarkable story of a beekeeper who had only one hive left after the Count de Mansveldt overran Embden. The bees did their best, however, to re-imburse him, becoming the parents and grandparents of thirty families within the following year.
When the swarm is preparing to depart there is an unwonted state of excitement expressed by a peculiar noise which Pliny thus comments upon: - "The king never quits the hive excepting when the swarm is about to depart; a thing which may be known a long time beforehand, as for days a peculiar buzzing noise is to be heard within, which denotes that the bees are waiting for a favorable day, and making all due preparations for their departure. On such occasions if care is taken to deprive the king of one of his wings, the swarm will not fly away."
Where the bee-keeper does not wish the number of bees in a hive lessened by swarming he still prevents it by clipping the queen's wings, for it is as Pliny said, - "When their leader is withheld from them the swarm can always be detained." "For they cannot possible live," says Moffett, "without a king, against whom, none is so hardy as to lift up his finger to offer him any violence, much less to conspire his destruction, unless he (after the fashion of tyrants) do overthrow and turn all things upside down, after his own will and lust, or neglecting carelessly the Weal publique, setteth all upon six and seven. Yea, if he accustom himself to go often abroad, (which he cannot do without the great hurt and prejudice of his Citizens) they do not by and by kill him, but they take from him his wings, and if he then amend his life and look better to his office, they singularly affect and honor him." A statement of the case which does more credit to the imagination than to the observation of those days.