Swarm

And then the one half that doesn't have a queen, they can buy a queen.

And you can install this in your hive and replace that dead out.

But what beekeepers can do is, if they have one surviving colony, they can split that colony in two.

About Swarm

When I heard about the vanishing bees, Colony Collapse Disorder, it motivated me to take action.

We were attacked by swarms of bees.

Setup Swarm Screen Saver

It sounded like a swarm of bees here.

So even though we've lost 30 percent of the colonies every year, the same number of colonies have existed in the country, at about 2.4 million colonies.

Now of course, if you lose a lot of colonies, beekeepers can replace them very quickly.

And one of our real worries with Colony Collapse Disorder is the fact that it costs so much money to replace those dead out colonies.

And this flu has wiped through the population of bees.

When I heard about the vanishing bees, Colony Collapse Disorder, it motivated me to take action.

If there's one guy who loses all his bees because of a truck overhaul, everyone pitches in and gives 20 hives to help him replace those lost colonies.

Of course, human groups are nowhere near as cohesive as beehives.

My head hums like a swarm of bees.

And this is the second year in a row we have lost over 30 percent of the colonies, or we estimate we've lost 30 percent of the colonies over the winter.

They behave with a swarm behavior, where they relate to each other, modeled after insect swarm behavior, and they could be made very numerous.

And so this opens up the whole idea of looking at colony health.

And bumblebees are what we call eusocial they're not truly social, because only the queen is, over winter.

So it means that beekeepers are very good at replacing dead outs, and so they've been able to cover those losses.

It comes in the mail it can come from Australia or Hawaii or Florida, and you can introduce that queen.

He's the one who first identified this condition and raised the alarm bells.

We know that there are these varroa mites that have introduced and caused a lot of losses, and we also have this new phenomenon, which I talked about last year, Colony Collapse Disorder.

Now, those losses are tragic on many fronts, and one of those fronts is for the beekeeper.

We also have Dave Hackenberg, who is the poster child of CCD.

Human groups may look like hives for brief moments, but they tend to then break apart.

She's like a queen bee with her pick of the drones.

Just makin' sure honey stays in her hive.

Bee?

Now, there's another part of that community which are the commercial beekeepers, the ones who make their livelihood from beekeeping alone.

Of course, the real importance for bees is not the honey.

This region's beekeepers produce honey particularly well.

I aimed to follow some bees and find the bee tree.

The bee sare buzzin' in the tree to make some honey just for me

And here you have the hive. You can see the queen bee, that large bee in the middle there. Those are all her daughters, the eggs.

But if you're losing 50 percent to 80 percent of your colonies, you can't survive three years in a row. And we're really worried about losing this segment of our industry.

Bee eaters eat bees. This one has a nice blue cheek.

Number of bees

It's a designer that put 10,000 bees at work and they built this vase.

(a) International conference on Asian honeybees and bee mites, Bangkok, February 1992

After a while he returned to take her and he turned aside to see the carcass of the lion and behold, there was a swarm of bees in the body of the lion, and honey.

After a while he returned to take her and he turned aside to see the carcass of the lion and behold, there was a swarm of bees in the body of the lion, and honey.

And after a time he returned to take her, and he turned aside to see the carcase of the lion and, behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase of the lion.