Spring is when honeybees are bringing in food, the hive is healthy and growing, and they simply … run out of space. That’s when they decide to split their overcrowded hives and send half swarming off in search of greener pastures.

But Southern California beekeepers saw that happen unusually early this year, which left many of them scrambling.

“Never before have I seen so many bees swarm in late February and March,” said Daniel Barkanov, a beekeeper with Bee Specialist who works primarily in the San Gabriel Valley. “Usually that happens between May and June,” he said.

“The shift this year was quite, quite dramatic in many areas, especially in Central and Southern California,” said Mateo Kaiser, a beekeeper and managing director at Swarmed, a network of 10,000 beekeepers focused on monitoring and safe hive relocation.

Beekeepers typically try to guide swarming so their their colonies can grow. They divide their own hives at the start of swarming season to prevent bees from flying off, and pick up unwanted ones that land in people’s attics and walls.

But this year, many were caught unprepared.

“They were scrambling to even just have the materials ready to catch the bees and get them into beehives,” Kaiser said.

Climate change is one likely culprit for the early takeoff.

“There’s substantive evidence that climate change alters bee reproductive cycles and colony dynamics,” said Boris Baer, co-director of the Center for Integrative Bee Research at UC Riverside.

Some beekeepers and scientists think the warm winter in the West and early flowering season this year led bees to go into their high-activity mode early, leading to earlier swarms.

That can pose a problem if they then run into food shortages with an unexpected cold snap or dry spring, like the one now in the West.

“If you give bees a kind of early signal here, like that spring has started, it’s warm, they jump into action,” Baer said. “Then you have drought, or you don’t have the normal amount of resources they can rely on, and the bees can run out of food during a very critical time of the year.”

Some bees are on the move at other times of year, but true swarm season kicks off when numbers cross a threshold after a period of warm, spring “growing degree days,” a term used by farmers to predict the growth of plants and insects.

Kaiser dated the start of Los Angeles County’s swarm season to March 12 this year, the earliest in the last five and probably the last 10 years. It’s also more than a month earlier than last year.

Barkanov thinks that one reason, besides the warm winter and spring, could be that the bees didn’t swarm enough last season. Air pollution and habitat loss are known to affect them, and last year was particularly difficult for hives here, with beekeepers reporting slow bee activity and losses from the January fires.

He said he was prepared for early swarms this year, but what he observed then was unexpected — a pause. “It doesn’t make sense why they started swarming, then stopped this year,” he said. “Bees are really, really confused on what’s going on.”

Many are reporting fewer bees on the move overall, which could mean fewer colonies are growing and splitting off this year in search of more space and food.

That could be a sign of poor health, said Barbara Baer-Imhoof, Baer’s co-director. “At this time of year, bees should be bringing in a lot of food, but we’ve been having to feed our bees constantly, throughout winter up until now,” she said.

U.S. honeybee declines have been making headlines since the early 2000s. Last year saw the largest die-off in recorded history, with beekeepers losing over 60% of their hives. Pesticides and environmental factors such as climate change and urban sprawl are known stressors. Research also links last year’s massive colony collapses to parasitic varroa mites that feed on bee larvae and transfer viruses to hives.

A shorter winter and earlier swarm can make bees more vulnerable to these pests.

Typically, bees stop laying eggs during the winter, or at least slow down activity, which represses mite activity. But warmer winters and “the spring season starting earlier means the mites have more prime time to reproduce and grow up in the colony,” Kaiser said.

San Fernando Valley-based beekeeper Nicole Palladino, who runs the relocation service Bee Catchers Inc, said she isn’t particularly concerned by a March start to swarming season.

“I think the bee population looks a lot better than it did last year,” she said. “Seeing the early swarm showed that a lot of the bees that we saw after the fires maybe became more stable and got stronger later in the season.

“If we were fully in peak swarm in January, that would terrify me,” she added.

Elina L. Niño, an apiculture professor at UC Davis, said many factors can contribute to earlier-than-usual swarm reports, as well as reports of fewer swarms, and an annual beekeeper survey out later in the year will provide a clearer picture of how the last year’s conditions have affected bees.

Kaiser agreed, but he said the survey will come out too late in the season for beekeepers to address shifts in swarming behavior and monitor for mites. “We chose to alert beekeepers to this now, and to have them keep an eye on this behavior,” he said.

The contract for management and operation of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will be opened up to a competitive bidding process for the first time in its history, the space agency announced on Friday.

The action forces Caltech to compete for control of the La Cañada Flintridge institution it has managed since NASA’s inception in 1958.

“The rapid growth of the U.S. space economy indicates there may now be a viable competitive market for programmatic and institutional elements,” NASA said in a statement. “This decision is part of a broader governmentwide and agency effort to find efficiencies, strengthen performance, and drive mission outcomes faster and more affordably.”

In a joint statement, Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum and JPL Director Dave Gallagher said that the announcement came as “no surprise” and that it already had a team in place “to ensure we are positioned for success” in the bidding process.

“Over the course of our nearly seven-decade-long partnership with NASA, Caltech and JPL have led humanity’s exploration and understanding of the universe — and our place within it,” the Pasadena university said. “The ambitions ahead — no less bold than those we have already realized— are ones we are fully prepared to meet.”

The competition for the contract is part of a slate of changes NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced on Friday, including a massive reorganization of the space agency intended “to concentrate resources towards the highest priority objectives in the National Space Policy and liberate the best and brightest from needless bureaucracy and obstacles that impede progress,” Isaacman wrote in a letter to the agency’s roughly 18,000 employees.

JPL was founded by Caltech researchers in 1936, and became part of NASA when the space agency was formed in 1958. Its current 10-year contract with NASA, which is valued at up to $30 billion, runs through Sept. 30, 2028.

Times staff writer Noah Haggerty contributed to this report.

Despite finding nearly one in five homes had excessive levels of lead, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this week claimed that recent soil testing in Altadena proved that expedited federal cleanup efforts had effectively removed toxic ash and debris from homes destroyed by the deadly Eaton fire.

Earlier this year, the EPA announced it would perform a limited soil sampling at 100 destroyed homes across the burn zone in order to verify that contractors had thoroughly mitigated toxic substances. In a recent news release, the EPA said that testing revealed median lead concentrations below federal standards, and “confirmed that cleanup methods successfully addressed contamination and verified cleanup protocols.”

The EPA soil sampling comes amid mounting pressure from residents and environmentalists who claim that a hasty federal cleanup effort had left behind or spread hazardous fire debris. Internal government reports also raised questions about the thoroughness of the cleanup.

The EPA did not release its report to the public, but it said 95 of 100 soil samples collected near the surface of the home’s building footprint were below the federal lead screening level.

“I think for the folks in Altadena who maybe had some concerns about the adequacy of the work that was performed by the federal government in removing ash and debris — I think they should feel confident that those areas of their property are safe to use now,” said Mike Montgomery, EPA Superfund and emergency management director.

In announcing its findings, the EPA cited federal lead standards only, and not California’s more stringent thresholds. Of the 100 homes sampled, 17 had lead levels above 80 milligrams per kilogram, California’s benchmark for residential properties. The highest concentration of lead was 705 milligrams per kilogram — nearly nine times higher than the state standard and triple the federal threshold, according to a copy of the report that was reviewed by The Times.

The results unnerved some Altadena residents, who see more and more fire-destroyed homes being rebuilt. Joy Chen, executive director of Eaton Fire Survivors Network, called on federal officials to release the full report and provide additional resources to address elevated contamination.

“From the beginning, people have been very worried that they [federal workers] did not thoroughly clear these sites. Now 16 months later, people are taking it upon themselves to test or bioremediate to ensure it’s safe to rebuild. Most of us don’t have the resources to make those decisions,” Chen said.

“It would’ve been much easier if homes had been cleared to safe levels the first time around.”

EPA officials said the agency had notified Altadena property owners of their soil test results and encouraged them to review local public health guidance. Montgomery said EPA officials would proactively reach out to property owners whose lots had lead levels above the federal benchmark of 200 milligrams per kilogram.

Federal disaster officials say that some toxic substances within the burn zone could have been deposited there long before the fire — the result perhaps of decades of burning leaded gasoline or lead paint.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency had refused repeatedly to pay for post-cleanup soil testing and broke from long-standing California fire recovery protocols that are intended to protect returning residents from toxic substances. FEMA, along with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA, had touted the fire recovery as the fastest in modern history.

Disaster crews removed millions of tons of fire debris from nearly 9,700 properties affected by the Eaton and Palisades fires in roughly eight months.

But hundreds of disaster victims had complained about substandard work from federal cleanup workers, and internal government reports said crews had left debris behind and, in at least one instance, dumped ash on a neighbor’s property.

In January — shortly after the one-year anniversary of the fires — the EPA announced that it would perform soil testing for lead at 100 randomly-selected homes that were destroyed in the Eaton fire and later cleared of debris by federal contractors. The announcement followed months of criticism that federal cleanup workers had mishandled debris — including dumping fire debris and contaminated pool water on neighboring properties.

The Los Angeles Times collected soil samples in March 2025 and published the first evidence that already-remediated home sites retained elevated levels of toxic substances. Los Angeles County, UCLA, USC and several other organizations launched their own soil testing efforts, and all found elevated levels of lead at homes that had already been remediated by federal cleanup crews.

Lead is a potent neurotoxin that can stunt the brain development and lead to behavioral issues in young children that inhale or ingest it. When the Eaton fire burned through Altadena’s historic neighborhoods, it destroyed many homes that were coated in toxic lead paint. Plumes of smoke and ash then deposited the heavy metal across the burn zone.

Dr. Nichole Quick, chief medical advisor for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, encouraged property owners to seek further testing if they have concerns about contamination, including free testing services provided by local universities.

Quick said residents can take steps to limit their exposure, such as washing dusty equipment and keeping cleaning floors and other surfaces clean.

“Guidance is really geared towards how you interrupt that ingestion exposure, so we’re talking about a high-risk group, our kids with developing brains, pregnant women,” Quick said. “Kids also happen to be the ones that crawl around on all sorts of stuff and hands directly into mouth, so a lot of what we’re talking about is stopping that sort of exposure.”

Environmental experts quickly questioned the EPA’s soil sampling approach, which drastically differed from soil testing procedures from California environmental agencies. Andrew Whelton, a Purdue University researcher who has studied environmental risk following disaster, said the EPA sampling — which only tested one mixed sample — would likely mask heavily polluted areas of the home. The agency also only tested for lead — one of 17 toxic metals typically tested for following wildfires.

“It’s apples and oranges,” Whelton said. “They [the EPA] only looked for lead and didn’t look for hot spots. The approach that EPA differs from everything that California has done for fire cleanup for the last 15 years.

“My advice to property owners who haven’t tested soil or are adjacent to the fire area is conduct soil testing as it has always been done.”

The EPA and L.A. County health department are expected to discuss the soil testing results at the Altadena town council meeting on June 16.