{"id":4011,"date":"2026-04-29T14:40:14","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T14:40:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/?p=4011"},"modified":"2026-05-01T12:47:55","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T12:47:55","slug":"what-my-honey-and-i-learned-by-losing-our-first-swarm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/?p=4011","title":{"rendered":"What My Honey and I Learned By Losing Our ‘First’ Swarm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By RAHN ADAMS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

MORGANTON, N.C. (April 30, 2026) — On Sunday morning when church bells were ringing in the Salem community, Timberley and I found ourselves smack dab in the middle of an intense kind of excitement for the first time. No, not a snake-handling revival meeting. A swarm of honey bees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT, the swarm, our hilltop beeyard, and the swarm (circled) in the tree where it alighted<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

They were our own relatively gentle Carniolan bees, not vicious Africanized mutants, though that meant we also had a financial interest in how and, more precisely, where<\/em> this buzzing whirlwind of Apis mellifera<\/em> wound up. We were standing in our own beeyard near the little house on the hill, and we saw the swarm alight high in a tree at the edge of our property. But we didn’t know how long they’d stay there or where they’d go when they inevitably left.<\/p>\n

That was the setup for the lesson in beekeeping — and in life — that we would learn over the next 30 hours, from the time we saw thousands of our bees boil out of their hive and fly in ever-widening and higher loops around us to their temporary resting place in that tree until we watched them suddenly break their cluster the following afternoon and noisily fly due west far, far away.<\/p>\n

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‘TWO BEE HIVES,’ (2026) a pastel drawing by Timberley Adams<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We’ve kept bees as a hobby for starting our third year now, buying “packages” from a local bee supply store the first two years and installing them ourselves. This was our first spring starting out with our own bees that had survived the winter. That’s a big deal for beginning beekeepers.<\/p><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whatever an individual colony’s eventual fate, we’ve enjoyed watching the bees through the spring, summer and fall. We got just a bit of honey from them last year. We also successfully divided, or “split,” our single, strong hive last spring and, as far as we know, lost no swarms large or small either year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our first year of beekeeping — our first week<\/em>, actually — we did lose an entire colony (that’s 10,000 worker bees and a mated queen worth $150) all at once. The whole package that we had just installed literally bugged out — absco<\/em>nded<\/em> is the term beekeepers use — after just three or four days in our new hive. We’re not exactly sure when they took off and left, because we were in Boone at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We did have another hive that first year — we’d bought two packages — and the remaining colony seemed to thrive through what was left of the spring nectar flow and even through the summer dearth until Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina in late September. That’s when yellow jackets became a problem for the hive. But we helped our bees fight them off, and the hive went into winter in seemingly good enough shape.<\/p>\n

What we didn’t know our first winter was that bees need more than food to survive three months closed up in their hive. They also need to be strong enough and numerous enough to heat however much hive space the beekeeper has left them with. That was where we doubly failed.<\/p>\n

For various reasons — specifically, an extended period of high heat, then a rainy period, then a hurricane and its aftermath — we didn’t treat our single hive adequately for Varroa mites, the bane of 21st-century beekeeping. Mites are a big reason why beekeepers can no longer set up a hive and leave it alone until they harvest honey. Also, we unknowingly left our bees in more boxes than they could heat on their own, with no insulation or windbreak.<\/p>\n

Having been told not to open a hive in winter so as not to break the insulating seals made by the bees, we watched the entrance and listened through the thin wooden walls for bee activity. Life was evident until a cold spell that February when I could make out no definite sound inside the hive. But like listening for the ocean in a big hollow seashell, I imagined<\/em> from one day to the next that maybe I was possibly hearing the sound of bees clustered for warmth.<\/p>\n

We learned the truth when the weather was finally warm enough to open the hive. We found what’s called a dead-out<\/em>, but we did come away with numerous frames of wax comb, as well as 10 frames of untouched honey. If those bees starved, it was because they couldn’t move their cluster close enough to the full box of honey we’d left for them. It was also possible that moisture within the hive was a problem because we hadn’t anticipated that, either.<\/p>\n

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FRONT AND SIDE thermal photos of our strong hive (top) and weak hive last winter<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Last year we did much better with Varroa mite testing and treatments in our two hives — another store-bought package and the hive that we split from the mother colony. We made special “candy boards” of winter food for both hives (in addition to the full box of honey that the larger hive had produced); and we insulated both hives against cold and moist conditions. We also bought an inexpensive thermal imaging attachment for a cell phone so that we could see inside the hives without opening them.<\/p>\n

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OUR EFFORTS to protect our remaining hive from cold, snow and wind last winter worked.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As things turned out, though, the larger colony in its larger enclosure again died, not because of mites or lack of food, but again because they had too much space to heat with too few bees — or at least that’s our theory. Also, two single-digit cold snaps this past winter didn’t help. When we discovered the more recent dead-out on January 17, we immediately built a windbreak behind the remaining hive and better insulated it for the frigid and snowy weather yet to come in what was an oddly warm winter overall.<\/p>\n

So, again, we started this spring with one hive. We’ve tried to manage it well by feeding the bees a mixture of sugar water, special nutrients and pollen to strengthen them; by treating them for mites and taking measures to ward off other pests to keep the colony healthy; and by inspecting the hive once every 7-10 days to keep track of their progress and any potential problems, like the creation of special queen cells (problems for us<\/em>, not for the bees).<\/p>\n

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A VIRGIN QUEEN emerged from this open swarm cell (lower right corner of frame).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There are three types of queen-producing cells: swarm cells<\/em> typically found at the bottoms of frames when, for whatever reason (usually hive congestion), a colony gets in the mood to swarm; supercedure cells<\/em> that can appear anywhere on a frame when the workers decide that the queen isn’t doing her job well enough, and they want to replace her with a younger queen; and emergency cells<\/em> that pop up anywhere when a hive suddenly loses its old queen and has to make a new one fast. It takes them 16 days to make a queen in any of those three ways.<\/p>\n

What we’d been doing to control the swarming impulse and to keep the colony in a single, regular-sized box called a deep<\/em> was remove any frames that we found to contain any type of queen cell, as well as a frame or two of capped brood cells that would hatch into young bees within the next week. We put those frames either into smaller hives called “nucs,” for nucleus colonies<\/em>, or a special, even smaller, three-compartment setup called a queen castle<\/em>. We later combined all those smaller colonies — frames from the nucs and the queen castle — into two additional regular-sized hives.<\/p>\n

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IT’S EASY to spot our two split hives’ queens in these photos taken Friday.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At the time of Sunday morning’s swarm, which began promptly at 10:30 a.m., we had one large hive (the one that had over-wintered), two regular-sized hives that had been split from the large one, and one nucleus colony. The queen castle was empty then, as we had just moved it to a new spot in our growing apiary. On Friday during our last inspection, we had seen the queens in both split hives. One included the original queen from the mother hive. We had moved her on April 11 to forestall swarming in that colony — postponed<\/em> was more like it.<\/p>\n

Also, in that last inspection, we had seen evidence<\/em>, though not conclusive, that the old queen had already been replaced in the mother hive — larvae and capped brood where we hadn’t noticed eggs or larvae during a previous check a week earlier. But that was why we chose not<\/em> to remove at least two queen cells that we also found during this past Friday’s inspection. We were afraid that if we took them all, we might be blocking the hive’s efforts to re-queen itself as quickly as it could. As it turned out, leaving those two queen cells (three<\/em>, we later learned) allowed the hive to swarm two days later, probably when one of those virgin queens was about to emerge (as you can see in the photo of the virgin queen’s empty cell above).<\/p>\n

What did we learn? From the bees’ perspective, there comes a time for the colony to act decisively — in this case, to swarm — when living conditions are no longer tolerable for whatever reason. As beginning beekeepers, we hadn’t provided that hive with enough extra space to accommodate the frames of capped brood (mainly cells of worker bees that were about to hatch) that we had left behind Friday. We had swapped out several frames with empty ones in the big box, and there were still eight empty frames in the second box that we had added a week or so earlier. But we hadn’t counted on so many bees being added to the colony all at once — on Sunday morning before the swarm took off. When we checked the hive Tuesday, after the swarm, there appeared to be just as many bees there as before. Also, we had taken their old, reliable queen and had forced them to make a new one — a life or death situation for the colony.<\/p>\n

That<\/em>, from our beekeepers’ perspective, was both where we messed up and what we learned by observing the swarm from start to (almost) finish; by gathering all the information we quickly could from the internet and from several beekeeping books we own, including Langstroth’s Hive and the Honey-Bee<\/em><\/a> and Beekeeping for Dummies <\/em>(the more helpful one, actually); by understanding that swarming is the bee colony’s most natural way to reproduce and survive; and by acknowledging that every beekeeper has lost or will lose a swarm now and then. It happened to us on Sunday because we didn’t have all the information we needed to make the right decision about how big of a split to make in the mother hive on Friday — that info being whether or not a new queen was already in the hive.<\/p>\n

We made the best decision we could with the information we had at the time. But it was the wrong<\/em> decision. That’s why beekeepers — and all people, really — need accurate, complete and timely information in order to do what’s right at all times. Another way of putting it is that we need the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in most serious aspects of our lives, especially when it involves the rule of law in a civilized society. Otherwise, something akin to a swarm occurs.<\/p>\n

In Norman MacLean’s classic fly-fishing book, A River Runs Through It<\/em>, the goal of the author’s free-spirited brother, Paul MacLean, is to “think like a trout” in order to become a better fisherman. In one of our favorite TV shows, Ted Lasso<\/em>, the title character tells a football (soccer) player he coaches to “be a goldfish” after a loss, because the little fish has a “10-second memory.” I can’t speak for Timberley, but I’m trying my best these days to think like a honey bee for the benefit of the bees that we’re keeping now, as well as for the good of the thousands of bees yet to be produced by our remaining colonies.<\/p>\n

Something else to remember is that any hive’s current queen initiates the swarm and leads it, usually taking half the hive with her. But the queen bee decides what to do — to swarm or not to swarm — based on the good or bad decisions made days, even weeks earlier by the beekeeper. And what’s so impressive about the swarm isn’t the lone queen bee in flight; it’s the thousands of worker bees and maybe scores of drones following her.<\/p>\n

So, everybody involved in this situation is responsible in one way or another for its outcome, and we all must deal with its consequences — the beekeeper, the queen and the other bees in the colony, right? No? Oh, I see. It all depends on who’s who in this little scenario.<\/p>\n

Well, we know who the workers and the lazy drones are. That’s us. But who is the beekeeper, and who is the queen? Be careful how you answer that. The correct response — at least here in modern America — may not be as obvious as it seems.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: This will probably be my last weekly column for a time while Timberley and I work on other writing projects (and tend to our bees, cats and houses). I’ll try to continue posting a Sunday Verses poem each week, because that takes less time for me to accomplish. Thanks for reading this far<\/em>.]<\/em>
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By RAHN ADAMS MORGANTON, N.C. (April 30, 2026) — On Sunday morning when church bells were ringing in the Salem community, Timberley and I found ourselves smack dab in the middle of an intense kind of excitement for the first time. No, not a snake-handling revival meeting. A swarm of honey bees. They were our … Continue reading What My Honey and I Learned By Losing Our ‘First’ Swarm<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4011"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4059,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4011\/revisions\/4059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}