The wife took this picture at her parent’s house this afternoon.
Bee Cluster on a Tree Branch(click for larger photo)
When a bee hive gets too crowded, it splits. The queen, some drones and half the workers cluster on a tree branch while scouts look for a new site. From National Geographic:
There the bees bivouac while a small percentage of them go searching for new real estate. Ideally, the site will be a cavity in a tree, well off the ground, with a small entrance hole facing south, and lots of room inside for brood and honey. Once a colony selects a site, it usually won’t move again, so it has to make the right choice.
The article tells about some experiments investigating how the bees decide on the best site. When a scout finds a good site, it returns to the cluster and does the waggle dance to tell other scouts where it is. Here’s how the waggle dance works:
3 minutes. Link to Video
The scouts visit all the prospective sites and vote for the one they prefer by hanging out at the entrance. As soon as 15 scouts accumulate at the entrance to one site, that one is considered the winner and they return to the cluster to tell the rest of the bees where to go. Who knew bees could count to 15?
National Geographic: Peter Miller | Swarm Behavior
