Spring is when honeybees are bringing in food, the hive is healthy and growing, and they simply … run out of space. That’s when they decide to split their overcrowded hives and send half swarming off in search of greener pastures.
But Southern California beekeepers saw that happen unusually early this year, which left many of them scrambling.
“Never before have I seen so many bees swarm in late February and March,” said Daniel Barkanov, a beekeeper with Bee Specialist who works primarily in the San Gabriel Valley. “Usually that happens between May and June,” he said.
“The shift this year was quite, quite dramatic in many areas, especially in Central and Southern California,” said Mateo Kaiser, a beekeeper and managing director at Swarmed, a network of 10,000 beekeepers focused on monitoring and safe hive relocation.
Beekeepers typically try to guide swarming so their their colonies can grow. They divide their own hives at the start of swarming season to prevent bees from flying off, and pick up unwanted ones that land in people’s attics and walls.
But this year, many were caught unprepared.
“They were scrambling to even just have the materials ready to catch the bees and get them into beehives,” Kaiser said.
Climate change is one likely culprit for the early takeoff.
“There’s substantive evidence that climate change alters bee reproductive cycles and colony dynamics,” said Boris Baer, co-director of the Center for Integrative Bee Research at UC Riverside.
Some beekeepers and scientists think the warm winter in the West and early flowering season this year led bees to go into their high-activity mode early, leading to earlier swarms.
That can pose a problem if they then run into food shortages with an unexpected cold snap or dry spring, like the one now in the West.
“If you give bees a kind of early signal here, like that spring has started, it’s warm, they jump into action,” Baer said. “Then you have drought, or you don’t have the normal amount of resources they can rely on, and the bees can run out of food during a very critical time of the year.”
Some bees are on the move at other times of year, but true swarm season kicks off when numbers cross a threshold after a period of warm, spring “growing degree days,” a term used by farmers to predict the growth of plants and insects.
Kaiser dated the start of Los Angeles County’s swarm season to March 12 this year, the earliest in the last five and probably the last 10 years. It’s also more than a month earlier than last year.
Barkanov thinks that one reason, besides the warm winter and spring, could be that the bees didn’t swarm enough last season. Air pollution and habitat loss are known to affect them, and last year was particularly difficult for hives here, with beekeepers reporting slow bee activity and losses from the January fires.
He said he was prepared for early swarms this year, but what he observed then was unexpected — a pause. “It doesn’t make sense why they started swarming, then stopped this year,” he said. “Bees are really, really confused on what’s going on.”
Many are reporting fewer bees on the move overall, which could mean fewer colonies are growing and splitting off this year in search of more space and food.
That could be a sign of poor health, said Barbara Baer-Imhoof, Baer’s co-director. “At this time of year, bees should be bringing in a lot of food, but we’ve been having to feed our bees constantly, throughout winter up until now,” she said.
U.S. honeybee declines have been making headlines since the early 2000s. Last year saw the largest die-off in recorded history, with beekeepers losing over 60% of their hives. Pesticides and environmental factors such as climate change and urban sprawl are known stressors. Research also links last year’s massive colony collapses to parasitic varroa mites that feed on bee larvae and transfer viruses to hives.
A shorter winter and earlier swarm can make bees more vulnerable to these pests.
Typically, bees stop laying eggs during the winter, or at least slow down activity, which represses mite activity. But warmer winters and “the spring season starting earlier means the mites have more prime time to reproduce and grow up in the colony,” Kaiser said.
San Fernando Valley-based beekeeper Nicole Palladino, who runs the relocation service Bee Catchers Inc, said she isn’t particularly concerned by a March start to swarming season.
“I think the bee population looks a lot better than it did last year,” she said. “Seeing the early swarm showed that a lot of the bees that we saw after the fires maybe became more stable and got stronger later in the season.
“If we were fully in peak swarm in January, that would terrify me,” she added.
Elina L. Niño, an apiculture professor at UC Davis, said many factors can contribute to earlier-than-usual swarm reports, as well as reports of fewer swarms, and an annual beekeeper survey out later in the year will provide a clearer picture of how the last year’s conditions have affected bees.
Kaiser agreed, but he said the survey will come out too late in the season for beekeepers to address shifts in swarming behavior and monitor for mites. “We chose to alert beekeepers to this now, and to have them keep an eye on this behavior,” he said.
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