Another beautiful autumn day.
It’s 27°C here in Matsuyama, warm enough to make us break a little sweat.
We hardly see any drones around the hive entrances anymore.
Those big-eyed, handsome boys who used to do pretty much whatever they pleased…
Now they’re being kicked out of the hive because they’re no longer needed, left to fend for themselves in a pretty harsh world.
To all the guys of my generation out there: hang in there! 😅
But even at this time of year, swarming* can occasionally happen.
Normally, swarming takes place from spring into early summer, when nectar is plentiful.
But when autumn wildflowers are abundant, some colonies seem to get the urge to swarm anyway.
(I’m sure there are other reasons, too.)
Some beekeepers split their colonies in late summer to create artificial swarms, but even that is usually done by early September at the latest.
As we move further into autumn, once the goldenrod finishes blooming in late November, there will be very few wildflowers left.
And this is also the time of year when there are hardly any drones around to mate with newly emerged queens.
Meanwhile, even if a swarm manages to find a nice new home—a prime piece of real estate, so to speak—it still has to build its comb from scratch using beeswax and then raise a new generation of “winter bees.”
That’s an enormous amount of work.
Whether they’re the ones leaving the hive or the ones staying behind, the odds of making it safely through the winter are pretty low.
That’s the reality.
We said we’d let nature take its course, but this is a season that keeps us on tenterhooks.
*Swarming is when a queen bee leaves the hive with a large group of worker bees, and the colony moves out in search of a new home.