Tiny, Late Summer Swarms

[NeilV]

I have had three swarm calls in the last two weeks. All were very little swarms, about the size of a grapefruit. I've heard about a couple of others. Not sure what the point of these swarms would be, since there is basically no way that they could have time to establish a hive and live through winter around here.

Based on the small amount of nectar that has been coming in to my hives, I have a hard time seeing how these are "overcrowding swarms." My hives are just sort of getting by.

On one of them I collected it, because it was at a house and the owner was weirded out by it. However, by the time I found the queen in it and killed her, the very small cluster of bees has gotten to flying around. It was hard to have enough bees to even do a combine. I decided on the others to just leave the bees alone.

Questions:

1. Is this normal?

2. What's the explanation?

3. Could this be a characteristic of survivor stock bees that allows them to have a break in the brood cycle to deal with mites?

4. What do you do when you find one of these?

[Slee]

Not sure why you killed the queen. Why didn't you hive them let them set up a bit and then remove the queen and combine them?

[brooksbeefarm]

I've had two swarm calls this week 9//2/09 they were about the size of a vollyball maybe a little smaller. I also had a hive swarm that wasn't crowded? I put the two swarms in deep hive body's with drawn comb and will feed,feed,feed and if the queen lays 3 or 4 frames of eggs i will combine it with one of the nuc's( with a young queen) i have on hand and try to get them through the winter:thumbsup: I run a theard on ( Late August swarms) last week and it seems this is happening to other beekeepers in different parts of the US of A.? Jack

[suttonbeeman]

Normal swarms this time of year are small (soft ball size). In the last two weeks I have gotten three swarms (not from my bees, most of them are in Wi) the smallest of them was 6 frames. The other two filled a hive body.........very strange for this time of year!

[Rohe Bee Ranch]

Or you could use the small swarm to re-queen and beef-up a weak colony.