Don't 'Bee' Alarmed By New Cluster Of Honeybees At Cedar Park Community Gardens

CEDAR PARK, TX — City officials ask residents not to "bee" alarmed by a congregation of honeybees at the community gardens. They're there by design, meant to pollinate the garden's plants.

"It’s the time of year that honeybees swarm and Cedar Park Parks and Recreation Specialist Irma Wall could not be more excited," city officials wrote in a news advisory. "As volunteer beekeepers, she and her teenage daughter, Emma, help care for the beehive installations in the Community Gardens at Elizabeth Milburn and Veterans Memorial Park."

Hives were installed last summer for the bees to help pollinate the plants in the gardens, city officials explained. In the last couple of weeks, Irma was called by a gardener to remove a large swarm of bees.

“I was able to save a beautiful honeybee swarm that had landed on a branch of a huge sunflower,” Wall said. “The honeybees were plentiful and weighty enough to break the branch and leave it dangling.”

What Wall did next was play a game of wits with the bees, city officials said.

“I was able to grab honeybees by the handfuls and place them into a nuc hive,” Wall said. A nuc is a small, five-frame hive. She was hoping that the swarm would recognize that their queen was with them and would begin building a new hive out of the new nuc .

“Confident I had placed the queen into the nuc, I closed it up and played the waiting game,” Wall explained.

The ploy worked. Later that night, Wall returned and observed that all of the honeybees had transitioned into the nuc. She sealed it up and relocated the new wild hive to another location, where she reports that it is thriving and doing well.

The tactic was meant to promote bee swarming, whereby a new honey bee colony is formed when the queen bee leaves the colony with a large group of worker bees. Swarming usually within a two- or three-week period during the spring, but occasional swarms can happen throughout the bees’ producing season, city officials said.

A swarm of bees sometimes frightens people, though the bees are usually not aggressive at this stage of their life cycle. This is mostly due to the swarming bees' lack of brood (developing bees) to defend, and their interest in finding a new nesting location for their queen, according to Wall. This does not mean that bees from a swarm will not attack if they perceive a threat, however, as most bees only attack in response to intrusions against their colony.

Bees seldom swarm except when the position of the sun provides direct and abundant light. Wall says swarm clusters, hanging off of a tree branch, will move on and find a suitable nesting location in a day or two.

While encountering a bee swarm for the first time can be alarming, there is not need for such trepidation. Bees tend to swarm near their hives or honeycombs, so if a swarm is visible then a nest is nearby, she said. Swarms are usually not aggressive unless provoked, but Wall says it is important to keep a good distance from them.

>>> Photo courtesy of City of Cedar Park