Orientation is not Swarming

When you are a new beekeeper, it's hard to distinguish between swarming, orientation, and robbing . A swarm leaves the hive with a roar and in a very determined swirl up into the sky - like a tornado of bees. Robbing involves attacking by one set of bees on the occupants of the hive. You can see the attack, dead bees scattered in front of the hive and general mayhem.

Orientation is a different experience. It can be confusing because it contains some of the elements of both swarming and robbing. There's noisy buzzing like a swarm and the hive appears to have many bees leaving all at once. It's chaotic like robbing and the bees appear to be confused about whether they are coming or going - which is how robbing can look.

Here is a video to at least demonstrate orientation for you to clear up some of the confusion. If you can be calm yourself and watch your own bees, you'll begin to see that the same bees are flying up, turning to look at the front of the hive and then returning to the hive to begin the "practice run" again. The other give-away about orientation is that it happens at pretty much the same time every day - somewhere between 3 and 4 PM.