Description :

Volume of nesting cavities in springs 1993 and 199420siteswereestablishedwitha13 anda31 liter wood pulp cylindrical hive schmidt and hurley 1995baitedwithamixtureof30 leachofcitral. Honey bees are social insects eusocial technically and the honey bee colony functions much like a living organism just as individual bees reproduce the colony must reproduce too swarming is the reproduction of a honey bee colony and it occurs when an existing colony subdivides into two colonies swarming is essential to the bees survival. Honey bee swarms may contain several hundred to several thousand worker bees a few drones and one queen swarming bees fly around briefly and then cluster on a tree limb shrub or other object clusters usually remain stationary for an hour to a few days depending on weather and the time needed to find a new nest site by scouting bees. When a honeybee swarm takes off to fly to its new home site less than 5 of the bees in the swarm have visited the site and thereby know in what direction the swarm must fly how does the small minority of informed bees indicate the swarms flight direction to the large majority of uninformed bees previous simulation studies have suggested two possible mechanisms of visual flight guidance . Bee i p swarm cluster k time step sj dance decay series l k i s 1 2 j n j fig 1 flow diagram summarizing the dynamics in the behavior of the scout bees that underlie the nest site selection process of honey bee swarms 104 swarm cluster and nest site however each time it returns to the cluster it dances os 15