WAs the weather gets colder, bees congregate. For more than a century, humans have been designing thin-walled beehives, believing that swarming behavior was beneficial to brood health and controlling mite infestations.
But the New study It showed that we were completely wrong: a bee swarm is a last-ditch effort to survive.
Wild honey bees overwinter in tree cavities, isolated by thick-walled tree cavities, 15 cm or more wide. But much of our understanding of bee behavior comes from observing them in thin-walled (1.9 cm) wooden hives.
Derek Mitchell, from the University of Leeds, modeled heat loss across a bee population to understand whether this behavior helps keep them warm. Previously, huddling was thought to help insulate bees from the cold, but Mitchell’s findings, published in the journal… Journal of the Royal Society InterfaceIt showed that the closer the bees got, the faster the heat flow between them increased. Rather than helping the bees stay warm, the swarming behavior appears to be a survival tactic, sharing warmth and trying to keep the bees out of swarming above the critical temperature of 10 °C (50 °F). Turns out bees need cozy homes too: it’s time to redesign the beehive.
