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Winter bees cluster inside the hive and forget where the entrance is. When spring arrives, they fly in bigger and bigger loops around the hive to relearn its location. If you see this looping behavior, your colony is healthy and strong.
Winter bees cluster inside the hive and forget where the entrance is. When spring arrives, they fly in bigger and bigger loops around the hive to relearn its location. If you see this looping behavior, your colony is healthy and strong.
If your colony looks like this in February, do not worry, the bees are not swarming. As the bees cluster up over winter, the bees can't get outside of the beehive, and what happens is they forget where they live. When you get a nice warm day in spring, all of those bees go out and they reorientate, which means they do ever-increasing loops around the hive to work out where it is they live and to ensure that they can get back every single time. If your colony looks like this in spring, you've done a very good job. You've got a nice, healthy, strong colony of bees.
