Left Behind: After the Honey Bee Rapture

Season 8 Episode 10: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Left Behind: After the Honey Bee Rapture

What happens inside a honey bee hive after a swarm leaves?

In this episode of About Bees, Culture, and Curiosity, Ron Miksha follows the parent colony after half the bees depart with the old queen. The story explores why bees swarm, how many bees leave, what remains behind, why swarm queen cells often produce excellent queens, and how new research on queen-cell architecture suggests that bees do more than feed queens royal jelly - they build specialized royal nurseries.

The episode also examines virgin queen piping, queen fights, afterswarms, mating flights, genetic turnover, honey crop losses, and the remarkable resilience of the old hive. Swarming may frustrate beekeepers, but for honey bees it is colony-level reproduction - one of nature's oldest and most successful survival strategies.

Recorded in Calgary, June 2026

· Fang, Y. et al. Queen cell architecture shapes honey bee queen development. Nature. 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10534-3. PubMed record: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42236932/

· UC Riverside News. "How honeybees really crown their queens." June 3, 2026.

· Chemical & Engineering News. "Queen bees emerge from special wax chambers." June 3, 2026.

· University of Florida IFAS Extension. "Swarm Control for Managed Beehives." ENY-160/IN970.

· Jim Tew, Bee Culture. "General Honey Bee Swarm Biology and Management (Part 1)."

· Thomas D. Seeley and Martin Lindauer traditions on swarm decision-making and nest-site selection, especially as discussed in Seeley's Honeybee Democracy and related American Scientist coverage.

· E.O. Wilson's Pulitzer Prize books: On Human Nature (1979); The Ants (with Bert Hölldobler, 1991)

· Tom Wenseleers. "Superorganism Revisited." BioScience 59(8), 2009, noting William Morton Wheeler's early use of the superorganism concept.

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Podcast website: https://sites.libsyn.com/540327/site
About Ron Miksha: https://about-bees.org/about-ron/

Finally: email your questions, comments, and angst: miksha@gmail.com