It was anciently believed that the queen led the swarm, but this view is not borne out by modern observation. As often as not half the bees are on the wing before she makes her appearance, and sometimes she is among the very latest to leave, or she may decide at the last moment not to go at all. In this case the bees do not cluster, but after a few minutes’ wild tarantelle in the sunshine they all troop back to the hive.
When once the swarming-party has gone off, the old hive seems to settle down to its ordinary occupations as though nothing out of the way had happened. The congested state of affairs no longer exists, but otherwise the work of the hive is proceeding in the usual way. The bees left behind are mainly young workers who have not yet commenced foraging, but there is always a fair sprinkling of old workers and drones. Generally the hive is queenless for the time being, the new queen not having yet broken from her cell. There may be four or five queen-cells in various stages of development, or rarely as many as a dozen. Sometimes, however, the first of the queens will be already hatched and wandering over the combs, meeting, as usual at this stage of her career, perfect indifference from all she encounters. But hives have been known to send off a swarm when the preparations for raising a new queen have been scarcely begun. So variable is the honey-bee in all her ways.
If the objects of swarming were merely to relieve the congestion in the hive, and to change the mother-bee, the whole thing should now be at an end. But the swarming impulse is rooted in far deeper soil than mere expediency. With some strains of bees the fever seems to die out after the one attack, and the stock settles down quietly to work for the rest of the season. But more often than not this first taste of adventure serves only to whet the national appetite for more. About nine days after the first swarm leaves another swarm often follows, and this may be succeeded by a third or even a fourth at a few days’ interval, resulting in some cases in the almost complete extinction of the stock. The old skeppists called the second swarm a “cast,” the third was a “colt,” and the fourth a “filly.” It is difficult to understand how, in a community where individual interest is so ruthlessly sacrificed to the general good, this self-destructive policy should be permitted. But taking the view that swarming is in the main a vague and incomplete resurrection of a long obsolete habit in bee-life, a workable theory at once suggests itself. Under primæval conditions the continued life of the mother-colony may have been unnecessary. Its purpose may have been fully served when a number of young queens and drones had been raised, and the whole had swarmed out together, each to form a new settlement. It must be remembered that the bee-hive, persisting indefinitely from year to year, is really quite a modern creation, and became practicable only with the invention of the movable comb-frame, which allowed the bee-master to effect the renewal of combs. It has been seen that the brood-combs get gradually choked up with the pupa-cocoons, which each bee leaves behind it. These webs are so incredibly thin that a dozen of them make little appreciable difference to the capacity of the cell, and combs have been known to remain in use for brood-raising as long as twenty years. But eventually they must become useless; and then, as bees do not, or cannot, remove old combs to make way for new, the community must leave for a new home, or gradually die out. Thus the age of the old hives was definitely limited.