When you select this node in the Swarmblade tree your hives will only shoot a maximum of 8 times. However, the skill states it will release thorns up to the maximum number of locusts it would have been able to release before taking the node. In this case its number of thorns released should be 14 to 15 (12 + 2 to 3 points from the pathing through the Grand Colony node.)
Additionally, the Bountiful Hibernacula node that needs to be taken to travel to the Spiked Vespiary node appears to do absolutely nothing once you have taken the Spiked Vespiary node. You would intuitively think that the function of the node giving health and rage on release of a locust would then apply to the release of a thorn burst, but it does not do anything.
Strength doesn’t appear to scale the damage the hives do either even though the hives show strength scaling on the ability bar.
Finally, the Spiked Vespiary node appears to have vague language that implies it might not treat the hives as totems even though they are using a totem’s skill tree. What makes it more questionable is if you have Storm Crows and have taken their Arborist node the crows temporarily attempt to fly to the summoned hives as if they were going to cast Wisdom of the Storm on the hive, but then stop themselves.
If this is the case that the hives are not totems, it should then explicitly state that the hives do not take on the totem tag. IMHO I think Spiked Vespiary should make the hives become totems as it opens up more build possibilities than if they were not.