1977] 
Seeley & Morse — Honey Bee Swarms 
203 
travelling less than 300 m to a new nest site. This pattern may 
simply reflect the smaller number of nest sites within a small radius 
area relative to a large radius area. But it could also represent a 
preference by swarms for nest sites beyond 300 meters from their 
cluster sites. Since swarms generally travel only a few tens of me- 
ters from the parent colony before settling at an interim cluster 
site, a preference for nest sites far beyond the cluster site would 
promote the dispersion of parent and daughter colonies. The fol- 
lowing section reports a test for this preference. 
Test of Preference for Distant Nest Sites 
To test whether swarms prefer distant nest sites, we offered 
swarms a choice between two nestboxes which were constructed 
and positioned as identically as possible, but with one 20 and the 
other 400 m from each swarm’s cluster site. These distances cor- 
respond to the low end tails and the modes of the distributions in 
Fig. 1. Lindauer (1955) performed a similar experiment with nest- 
boxes 30 and 250 m from a swarm. His swarm chose the 250 m 
site. However, the lack of repetitions and of controls for differ- 
ences in nest site exposure, to which bees are highly sensitive, make 
this experiment’s result suggestive rather than conclusive. 
The nestboxes for our experiment were nailed onto two very 
similar sand pines 380 m apart. Each nestbox was cube-shaped, 
40 liters in volume, and had a 3 cm diameter entrance hole posi- 
tioned midway across the front, 8 cm up from the nestbox floor. 
A nail driven horizontally across the entrance prevented occupa- 
tion by birds. The nestboxes were constructed of 1.5 cm thick 
plywood and were painted dark green on the outside. Nestbox 
floors were removable to permit interior inspections. The seam 
between the floor and the walls of each nestbox was sealed with 
opaque photographic tape. The entrance of both nestboxes faced 
south and was 3.75 m above the ground. The wind, sun and rain 
exposures of both nestboxes were carefully matched by trimming 
off branches about the nestboxes and by nailing a shade board 
(56 X 100 cm) atop each nestbox. 
Each trial of the test was started by introducing a colony of bees 
into the study area, positioning it 30 m from one of the nestboxes 
as shown in Fig. 2. We left each colony undisturbed for at least 
two days of good weather to provide time for the colony’s orienta- 
tion to its new home range. On the third day or later an artificial 
