Melissa Russell
Are you ready for the swarming season?
Phil Thomas is.
Thomas owns the Belmont Bee Company, a small business specializing in organic honey sourced from his local hives. He is a master beekeeper, having gone through the three-year Cornell University Master Beekeeping course.
He will also come and get your bees.
May is swarming month, Thomas explained, when the queen and some bees in her hive–feeling cooped up after a dormant winter in an overcrowded, overheated home–decide to seek out a new location. When temperatures rise to over 50 degrees, bees will pour out of the hive with a roar, swirl around for a while, and then zoom out as a collective. They don’t tend to go very far from home, primarily because the queen is tired from laying about 2,000 eggs a day and can’t fly that far before needing a rest.
“She’s pretty docile,” Thomas said. “I can put my hand right in the middle of the whole swarm and not get a single sting because they aren’t defending their hive. They’re just in the middle of moving to a new place.”
Sometimes, though, that resting spot is a low-hanging branch, a car, a doorway, inside a wall, or on an unused barbecue grill — or pretty much any other space where people need to pass through.
That’s when Thomas’s phone rings, and residents and business owners call for help with the thousands of bees suddenly appearing on their site. The honeybees must be removed and rehomed, as they are unlikely to survive outside of a hive for long, especially when overnight temperatures plunge.
Thomas said he will come and pick up the bees using special vacuums and nets to catch them as gently as possible.
“I once picked up a swarm in the bleachers during a Belmont football game,” he said.
On a recent April afternoon, Thomas inspected his beehives, a dozen of which are in the Rock Meadow Conservation land.
“Beekeeping is far more complicated than most people realize,” he said, zipping into his protective canvas jacket with an attached netted hood and long canvas gloves. He brings a tool to pry the hive open and a smoker, a device used to calm honeybees, but today, he barely needs it. The bees are fairly quiet and unbothered as he slides out trays packed with honey and brood, scrapes off debris, and checks the health of the hive. Thomas is on the lookout for signs of varroa mites, one of the most damaging honey bee pests in the world, which can cause the death of an entire bee colony. Those mites, along with climate change, pesticide use, and loss of habitat, are responsible for a dramatic loss of honeybee population over the past couple of decades, but their status is improving, Thomas said, partially due to the activities of amateur beekeepers like himself.
While he works, Thomas explains how the swarming bees look for a new nesting location. While the queen gets some much-needed rest, scouting bees head out to find a desired location.
“They come back, and there’s a little dance the scout bees do, and the direction and length of the dance shows the direction of the new home. Some will do one dance, others do another. And the bees say, ‘I like that dance better,’ then they all take off and fly to the new home.”
That process can take a few hours or a few days, he said. The bees in the old hive designate a new queen by feeding an embryo large quantities of royal jelly, a sugary, nutrient-rich secretion made by worker bees. While all the larvae consume royal jelly, the designated queen gets two to three times as much as the others, and she develops differently. She is the sole egg layer in the hive, and when she can no longer reproduce, the bees will kill her and create a new queen.
While Thomas raises bees to sell their honey, he is careful to leave enough behind for them to survive through the winter. A hive can produce about five gallons of honey, or about 60 to 70 pounds, from a harvest up to twice yearly. The honey sold by the Belmont Bee Company is raw, not pasteurized, and is untreated by chemicals.
When he’s not working with bees, Thomas, who has been a CEO several times over, coaches executives and corporate teams with about 50 clients around Boston. He believes emulating how bees interact makes for a strong corporate culture.
“We can learn from the bees regarding their industriousness,” he said. “They don’t fight amongst each other, and they work for the common good. Everybody knows their job, and they do it well. It is a very results-oriented environment.”
More and more people are becoming amateur beekeepers, and Thomas said anyone who wants to become a beekeeper can do so, even without the Cornell program. Just buy the hive boxes, the bees and the gear, and “bingo, you’re in business.”The Middlesex County Beekeeper Association, of which he is acting president, is focused on educating beekeepers and assigns mentors to new beekeepers to get them up to speed and keep them from “killing their bees unnecessarily.”.
“A lot of young people, especially high school kids, get together and get hives,” he said. “We want them to do it responsibly and educate them, so we make sure they get off to a good start.”
What to do if you see a honeybee swarm
Swarms are not dangerous, but individual bees might sting to defend the swarm if disturbed. If you see a swarm, photograph it and call the Middlesex County Beekeepers Association at 781-630-1129. More information is available at middlesexbeekeepers.org.
