Swarms of bees are no threat, but unwelcome in urban areas
Bee swarms have made the Montreal news twice in the last month.
Seeing thousands of bees pushing to attach to one small space is an unsettling sight for many of us, but bee expert Alexandre Beaudoin said the behaviour is perfectly natural.
“June is the month bees swarm,” Beaudoin said. “It happens in the city a lot, but if the swarm is in a place people don’t frequent, it goes unnoticed. If it happens in downtown Montreal, it’s a different story.”
Beaudoin is a biodiversity expert at Université de Montréal and works with the urban-bee co-operative Miel Montréal. He said bee pollination plays a crucial role in balancing the planet’s biodiversity and says we should do everything we can to encourage the health of the bee population. In early June, a swarm attached itself to the rear end of a car in downtown Montreal. Last week, bees swarmed a tree in Lachine during a severe rainstorm.
In both cases, Beaudoin was called to the scene to coax the swarm into a box.
“I prevent the bees from returning to the same spot to swarm by taking them at least one kilometre away before releasing them,” he said.
Beaudoin said bees leave a hive en masse for a couple of reasons.
“When a queen bee is born, she leaves with (thousands) of bees to find a place to build a hive and reproduce,” Beaudoin said.
There are around 80,000 bees in a hive and swarms hover at around 30,000 bees.
There are 350 species of bees in Quebec. (Interesting fact: the honey bee is not one of the indigenous species. It was imported from Europe.)
Beaudoin supports urban beekeeping, but says beekeepers must pay close attention to their hives to prevent swarming.
“You have to watch for evidence of royal cells (queen-bee cells) and remove them,” he said.
He said urban beekeepers should know how to force the division of a hive so that the bees have plenty of room and don’t feel compelled to swarm.
Beaudoin said homeowners have started renting their backyards to urban beekeepers and that can be problematic because the homeowner doesn’t necessarily know about bee behaviour. Left unchecked, swarming may occur.
Planting flowers and clover goes along way to help keeping bees well fed and can help prevent a swarm leaving in search of new food sources.
“When you put a hive in your backyard, you have 80,000 bees competing with the local bees for the same food,” he said.
When Beaudoin was called to the downtown swarm, he had none of his equipment with him, so he improvised by gently pushing the bees into a cardboard box with his bunched up sweater.
He tried a new vacuum filtering technique in the tree in Lachine, but said it didn’t go so well. Working high up in a tree in pouring rain was both difficult and dangerous.
Handling a swarm of 30,000 bees doesn’t faze Beaudoin.
“When bees prepare to leave the hive, they fill themselves with honey because they don’t know how long it will be before they find a suitable new home,” Beaudoin said. “The honey makes them heavy and slow.”