Have you witnessed any sign of distress from a clipped queen who can no longer fly and wishes to join her daughters in the colony's natural process which is the ability to swarm?
With respect I would have thought that someone with your obvious knowledge and experience would have thought a little deeper about this.
Peach of a reply. Rarely seen a post so dripping with a sense of superiority.
Clippings purpose is to delay the actual event of swarming. Period. It gives the beekeeper extra time to control and prevent the swarming. It is a strategy to retain an asset of value, AND a social responsibility. Peppering your area with swarms because you do not want to distress your bees by preventing it gets us all a real BAD name.
Distress? No real sign of it, and have many many times seen the swarm try to emerge and the queen be unable to join in. You just catch her, put a new brood box down on the spot, put her in a cage inside with a wee bit of candy to cause a short delay in her coming out again, and bingo.........a nice swarm when all the flyers come back. If she HAS come out there will be what we call a 'pudding swarm' nearby and this runs into a new hive in the blink of an eye when offered a new home.
If you want distress think of the neighbours who get an unwanted, and even terrifying at times to the lay person, swarm of bees in their garden or buildings. Think of the dissolute bunch that would barely fill a little nuc left in your hive on a few occasions when the swarm has gone, the castes have gone, and the last Q they have to get going again gets eaten by a swallow on her mating flight. It all happens.
Your tone to some of the other participants in this thread has been patronising in the extreme and bordering on the offensive. You are accusing amateur beekeepers of only doing things for economic reasons, which frankly seems like little more than trolling as it is so wrong. I am happy for you to accuse ME of doing things for economic reasons irrespective of its validity, but lay off the little guys.
