For N. American Beekeepers, Swarming Season Started Nearly 3 Weeks Earlier Than In 2025 (After Record Dieoff)
After a series of record-breaking US heatwaves, the 2026 bee swarm season in North America has started 17 days earlier than last year, pushing beekeepers to adapt to a rapidly shifting season while raising new questions about how honeybees are responding to the climate crisis. According to a new report published by Swarmed, a tracking network of more than 10,000 beekeepers, focused on safe and ethical honeybee relocation, this year’s unusually early swarm season follows several years of record colony declines worldwide.
Bee swarming is a natural reproductive process that typically occurs in spring in response to overcrowding and limited space within the hive. During swarming, a colony splits into two or more groups as the original queen leaves with approximately half of the worker bees to establish a new hive, while the remaining bees stay behind to rear a new queen. Honeybee overcrowding has already become a problem for wild bees. Because honeybee populations are artificially elevated, they often outcompete wild bees for nectar and pollen, especially in environments where resources are limited. This places additional pressure on wild bee species, which are already experiencing far steeper population declines.
The early start to this year’s swarm season follows the largest honeybee die-off in recorded US history, when beekeepers reported losing more than 60% of their colonies last year. Such an impact has hit the US agriculture sector particularly hard, as it relies heavily on bees for crop pollination, which contributes roughly $15bn in added crop value.Recent research has pointed to the parasitic varroa mite, which appears to be increasingly resistant to the chemicals used to control it, allowing the pest to spread viruses by attaching itself to worker bees.
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He (Ed. - Swarmed Managing Director Matteo Kaiser) noted that bees traditionally stop laying eggs during winter, creating a natural pause that helps suppress mite populations by limiting places for them to reproduce. But warmer and shorter winters may be disrupting that cycle, with some colonies now breeding year-round and swarming earlier than usual – conditions that could also accelerate varroa mite reproduction. “If we are seeing all of a sudden … [that] the bees are laying eggs all year round because the climate is warming, and they are swarming earlier because of it, then this may also point to varroa mites reproducing at unprecedented rates … It will be interesting to look at how this early season connects to this year’s winter losses,” he said.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/17/north-america-bees-early-swarm-season