1977] 
Seeley & Morse — Honey Bee Swarms 
207 
periments the bees came from the same source, the apiaries of 
Dyce Laboratory, and in both experiments the bees were prepared 
as artificial swarms using nearly identical techniques. We suspect 
the disparity in experimental outcomes simply reflects a lack of 
nearby nest sites in the first experiment which forced the swarms 
to choose distant nest sites. If so, then our findings suggest that in 
nature the spacing out of feral honey bee colonies is based more 
upon the dispersion of suitable nest sites than upon programmed 
dispersal behavior in honey bee swarms. 
Our findings also suggest that swarms prefer moving only a short 
distance to a new home site. Minimizing dispersal distance may be 
advantageous to swarms in reducing the hazard of losing poor fly- 
ing queens. It might also help keep the daughter colony near the 
closely related, and thus perhaps minimally aggressive, mother col- 
ony. Robbing and foraging range restriction are probably the most 
common forms of aggression between bee colonies. Furthermore, 
because the honey bee’s flying ability enables it to forage over very 
large areas, colony dispersal may not significantly reduce the com- 
petition, if any, between colonies for food. 
We close this report by stating a possible weakness of this study: 
use of artificial swarms. Because this study’s experiments required 
many repetitions, they would have proceeded exceedingly slowly 
had we used only swarms emerging naturally from colonies placed 
at the study sites. Thus we used the readily available artificial 
swarms. And these swarms appear to behave normally while se- 
lecting a nest site. They form a quiet cluster, dispatch scouts which 
discover and select the new home site, and finally fly to the chosen 
site. However, if a swarm’s dispersal behavior is stimulated by its 
scouts’ close familiarity with the surrounding region or is depen- 
dent upon the natural process of swarm formation, then our arti- 
ficial swarms would have shown abnormal dispersal behavior. 
Acknowledgments 
We thank Richard Nowogrodzki for field assistance and the 
Archbold Biological Station for the use of their research facilities. 
Bert Holldobler critically reviewed the manuscript. Supported by 
the National Science Foundation (Grant No. BMS 76-15008), and 
the Anderson Fund and the Parker Fellowship, both of Harvard 
University. 
