“A Queen may abandon her hive to look for a new home with more space. Usually she will take 80% of her workers with her, leaving behind larvae which nurse bees will feed Royal Jelly to as they hatch. This is the process to create a new Queen.”

Tom Blacklock

This morning - 13 November - we arrived at school to a big surprise: a swarm of bees had left one of our hives and some had infiltrated behind the gib the builders had put up!

The reason this happened was because Ms. M changed the layout of the hive getting it ready for spring and the Queen didn't like it, so she organised her girls and moved.

However when a Queen moves, ALL the other bees move; it was like a migration. Blankets of bees were seen around the beehives and gibbing outside the classes on the far side of the school. Scout bees were on the lookout for a new home while about 6000 of them hung out on a lavender bush on a concrete wall close to where the hives are. They were surrounding the Queen, looking out for her.

Unfortunately, most of the scout bees died in the classrooms they had gone into that morning, but some survived and were flying around.

Ms. M called a man named John from the Wellington Bee Association to deal with the situation and he came with his 2 Hive Doctor’s - a fancy name for the boxes that swarms are caught in. He left his Hive Doctor boxes here for the day and by the afternoon all the bees had moved in.

Luckily, everything was resolved quickly. John got a new Queen and honey bees for one of his hives, we continued with our 2 healthy hives and we all got to see what was going on.