What to Do About Swarming : 27 Tasks for April
• Start your seven-day inspections with a detailed one, checking for disease and the presence of the queen.
• Mark the queen early in the season as she is easier to fi nd before the colony builds up to full strength.
• Make sure you have enough spare equipment ready for the start of the main swarming season.
• Make sure you have clean supers ready for honey collection.
• Replace old mouldy tattered comb regularly, preferably with drawn
queen cells) to the other side of the original site. Turn the hive through 180° so that the entrance faces in the opposite direction. Even more bees will fl y back to the artifi cial swarm.
6 Make sure this unit is fed or contains combs of food as it has lost its foragers. Keep its entrance small to reduce the likelihood of robbing.
7 By now there should be too few bees in the old hive to throw a cast. However, if you are unsure, leave just one unsealed queen cell, destroying all the others. By leaving an unsealed queen cell you know it is viable, but sealed queen cells may contain a dead queen or none at all. Allow four weeks following emergence for the new queen to mate and start laying, trying not to disturb the colony during this time.
8 If at the end of the season you want just one colony to overwinter then the old queen can be removed and the two colonies united through newspaper.
April 2015 Vol 97 No 4 comb or foundation.
• Do not split the brood as chilling will occur.
• Keep your hive records up to date
• There is still time to hang Asian hornet traps around the apiary to kill off the queen hornets before they start building their nests. Although they have not yet arrived in the UK, they will be a severe pest if/ when they do. One of BeeBase’s Advisory Leafl ets, Training Manuals and Fact Sheets describes a suitable trap you can make from a plastic drinks bottle.
Compared with other methods of swarm control, I feel that this one is the best. It is successful, simple and robust, causing the least disturbance or confusion to the bees (or beekeeper) and follows the bees’ natural inclinations.
Responsible Beekeeping Sometimes, no matter how
hard you try to work with the bees, it is easy to miss the preparations for swarming. Suddenly it looks like it is raining bees for about ten minutes and it can be diffi cult to decide which hive is swarming when there are several colonies in an apiary. A bait hive (an empty hive containing frames) in the apiary is always a good idea, especially if regular inspections are diffi cult.
Some ‘let alone’ beekeepers will wait until a swarm comes out of their hive before they take any action. This may work as long as there is a suitable low tree or bush for them to settle on and the beekeeper is around to notice it happening. If they miss the swarm and do not look through their bees at all, there
may be so many casts issuing that the hive swarms itself out, becoming so weak that it cannot survive. The numerous small casts emerging are also unlikely to survive without help and this is in no way good for the bees.
Mating Swarms – A Rare Occurrence
A mating swarm is when a number of bees come out of the hive and accompany the virgin queen on her mating fl ight. They become so excited trying to encourage her to go outside that they are stimulated into fl ying out with her, but it does not happen very often. Last year while looking
through a professional beekeeper’s 30 plus hives, we heard a loud buzzing sound behind us. We were lucky enough to see a mating swarm emerge from a hive that we knew from our notes contained a virgin queen. We saw the swarm slowly make its way to the middle of the fi eld next door and hover there for about ten minutes, possibly waiting while the queen fl ew higher to mate with a number of drones. The swarm then made its way back to a blackberry (not gooseberry) bush for a short time and then the bees all poured back into their hive.
This shows the importance of keeping good records. We didn’t panic because we understood exactly what was happening. It was really exciting but quite rare to see.
Collecting Swarms
This can be fun as long as you have received enough information and are prepared
Dinah lives in Caerphilly. She has about 20 colonies, which she manages with her husband John, and runs a number of beekeeping courses. She is a seasonal bee inspector, a job she enjoys even
more than her previous occupation as a physiotherapy lecturer.
www.bee-craft.com
with secateurs, skep, sheet, bee brush, ladder, etc. Swarms are usually placid as they have gorged on honey before they left, in order to start making wax comb as soon as they have settled in their new abode. It is a different story if they have been out in the open for a few days, unable to forage due to bad weather.
Many beekeepers keep a separate site just for swarms as they may be carrying disease but as long as they are not fed for about fi ve days then it is usually safe to bring them to your home apiary. Any bacteria present in the honey become embedded in the new comb out of harm’s way. It is still important to keep an eye on the brood for at least two cycles to check that it is healthy. Watching a swarm placed onto a sheet spread over a board leading up to a new hive and, if you are lucky, seeing the queen crawl over the bees is such an exciting event. However, putting the swarm straight into a hive with a framed queen excluder on the bottom (remembering to remove it after a week) is probably a better way to ensure that the colony stays put. ♠
Reference
Seeley, T (2010). Honeybee Democracy, Princeton University Press
Contact
Dinah@dinahsweet.com or
www.sensiblebeekeeping.co.uk
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