swarm out and back to hive

[zuckerman]

Howdy,
I just witnessed my first swarm, at least I think it was a swarm. I have 2 hives in the backyard and I was mowing the back yard, made one pass close to one of my two backyard hives, and continued to mow the lawn away from the hives, then noticed a large amount of bees in flight, stopped the mower, and looked up, thousands and thousands of bees in an area roughly 40X 40 and going up at least 75 feet! noisy!!! loud!!! neighbors were wondering what I was doing, they thought it was neat... but everybody went into their house to watch... me? I stood in the middle of the yard and watched.. WOW.
This erratic flight continued for about 12-15 minutes then I noticed the bees swarming back to the hive, (it reminded me of swarms of starlings in the fall, or minnows in a pond, whoosh! in an almost straight line to the hive) then the bees began to enter the hive again, and after another 15 minutes there are still more bees than normal on the entrance of the hive but not excessive...50, maybe 75 or so...

history, yesterday I was checking the hives, both had one to three day old eggs and larva in the brood, without searching for her I saw the queen in one hive, but no supersedure cells, nor anything else out of the ordinary.Both have started a good 5 or 6 frames of honey, and they were calm, and working. this morning the bees were calm, I could stand offset to the entrance and watch, and not be bothered by them. hive and bees seemed normal.
so did I set them off with the mower?

[yamahawg]

I just had the same thing happen yesterday! I had been mowing earlier, but had been like maybe an hour since I had stopped, and decided wasn't going to mow around my beeyard/garden area. So, yeah thats something to think about, could a mower have anything to do with it haha! They all returned to the hive as well.

[KQ6AR]

One of our nucs did that this year. We found a queen with a very small cluster of bees on the ground in front of the nuc.
They returned because the queen wasn't with them. Check around the ground for a small cluster of bees.

[Konrad]

This happened to me one's about 2 years ago...but settled on a tree first, when trying to take them down they
took off and about 15 min. they came back into the hive...WOW!