[f. SWARM v.1 + -ING2.]
1. Assembling or moving in a swarm; forming a swarm or dense crowd; thronging; very numerous.
1590. Spenser, F. Q., II. x. 63. Those spoilefull Picts, and swarming Easterlings.
1725. Pope, Odyss., XIII. 179. The swarming people hail their ship to land.
1784. Cowper, Task, III. 555. Moisture and drought, mice, worms, and swarming flies.
1817. Shelley, Rev. Islam, V. xxxviii. To see Earth from her general womb Pour forth her swarming sons to a fraternal doom.
1856. Froude, Hist. Eng., I. i. 40. Barges pursuing their now difficult way among the swarming steamers.
2. spec. of bees; also transf. of persons: see SWARM v.1 1, 1 b.
1553. Grimalde, Cicero’s Offices, I. (1558), 69. Being swarming [orig. congregabilia] by kinde they work their combes.
1697. Dryden, Virg. Past., VII. 18. See … How black the Clouds of swarming Bees arise.
1713. Young, Last Day, II. 51. Swarming bees,… Charm’d with the brazen sound.
1869. Freeman, Norm. Conq., III. xii. 147. Whence Ambigatus had sent forth his swarming colonists.
3. Filled with a swarm or multitude; densely crowded; thronged; very populous.
1810. Montgomery, West Indies, II. 117. That stock he found on Afric’s swarming plains.
1842. Tennyson, Talking Oak, 213. The swarming sound of life.
1858. Hawthorne, Fr. & It. Note-bks. (1872), I. 16. A swarming city.
4. Biol. Emerging as swarm-spores, or moving in the way characteristic of them: see SWARM v.1 1 c.
1864. Reader, 30 April, 548/3. The swarming-spores of certain Algæ.
1882. Vines, trans. Sachs’s Bot., 232. In many of the more highly developed Thallophytes this power of motility is however limited to the male ‘swarming’ fertilising elements.
