A Tanging Tale

No coverage of swarming would be complete without a reference to tanging. Tanging is an intriguing bit of beekeeping folklore, but does it really work?

The idea is that a beekeeper can entice a swarm down out of a bush or tree and into a hive box just by banging two metal objects together in rhythmic pattern for, well, a while.

Before you laugh yourself silly, you need to know that this is an ancient beekeeping custom, perhaps as old as Medieval times when beekeepers routinely promoted swarming to offset killing half their colonies every year at harvest time. But beekeepers then, as now, had to contend with the unpredictable, bee-driven nature of swarms. Although early beekeepers reportedly slept in their apiaries during swarm season in order to be on hand to capture them all, inevitably some swarms got away.

Common Law established the principle that if you hived a swarm, it became your property, no matter whose hive it had originated from. As a result, if you were pursuing a swarm, and hoping to establish an ongoing claim to it, you needed a way to signal your intention without being able to send out a group text to nearby beekeepers. To do that, the practice was to keep banging two objects together to maintain the claim. Metal objects make a louder noise than wooden ones. Some swarms were undoubtedly recaptured during this pandemonium. And eventually metal-banging began to be conflated with hiving-success due to confirmation bias reinforcing an apparent cause and effect relationship. Or at least, that’s how I imagine a cultural historian might explain this odd practice.

I read about it and filed it in my mind under amusing bee-lore

That was until a few years ago on the day after Labor Day, when I was 12 feet up in my neighbors' cherry tree and still not able to reach a swarm from their only colony. The thing is, that we'd already hived them once, for about 20 minutes. And then, they departed again leaving only a handful of bees behind. I looked through those bees very carefully and concluded the queen (which I had marked only a few months before) was not among them and was likely up in the tree. The bivouac branch was too high for me to reach even after I climbed as high as I dared.

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