New beekeepers often mistake orientation flights for swarming. Young foragers make expanding loops around the hive entrance, gradually traveling up to 3-4 miles on foraging trips. This normal behavior means your nuc is healthy, not about to swarm.
If you're seeing bees like this in front of your entrance, it is orientation flights and nothing to worry about. So probably one of the biggest questions we get 1 or 2 weeks after sending our nucs out to customers is they send us a picture, they send us a video of the bees behaving like this, and they say, my bees are swarming, I need help, what do I do? So I thought I'd do this video just to show that this behavior here is not swarming behavior. I've just got a 6, maybe up to 7 or 8 frame nuc now in here that is expanding nicely, but still plenty of space before they go off and swarm. What you're seeing here is forager bees going out and forager bees coming back, but also really young bees that are going out on their first ever flights. These flights are called orientation flights because they're effectively triangulating to this position. The bees will come out and they'll do a little loop like that, and then they'll go back into the beehive, and then they'll do a slightly bigger loop round like that, and they just keep on going bigger and bigger and bigger until they get to miles away. And bees will fly up to 3 or 4 miles in any direction to go out and get the nectar or the pollen that they want. But these really big, long journeys start with these tiny little circling orientation flights. It's one of the nicest things to see. You can see the bees are pretty chilled. All they want to do is just work out where they are. So don't worry about it. It's very likely not going to be swarming. It's orientation flights, and it's something that you can just sit back, watch, and really enjoy.
