Artificial Swarms swarming again

[BILL.HEARD]

Over the years I have used artificial swarming in my management, the old stock being re-queened later in the season. However with or without re-queening I rarely had the old stock swarm out later the same year.
This year has proved me wrong, I had made a number of artificial swarms in early June, using National Commercial boxes they built out all eleven brood combs and were in their second supers, three decided to swarm, one this morning during the rain showers.
Normally most swarming has finished by this time in my part of Devon, I have put the above down to the strange weather patterns this year, has anyone else had the same problems with artificial swarms this season?

 

[rae]

Ours needed the first round of artificial swarming at the end of April. Despite loads of room (14x12 broods) and loads of super capacity, they made queen cells. They have now build up to a huge size again - the biggest have 9 full frames of 14x12 capped brood ready to emerge. I am thinking that they are going to want to swarm again pretty soon.

The percentage of the first artificial swarms that mated successfully was lower than last year - we had 50% drone layers.

 

[Gardenbees]

Ours needed the first round of artificial swarming at the end of April. Despite loads of room (14x12 broods) and loads of super capacity, they made queen cells. They have now build up to a huge size again - the biggest have 9 full frames of 14x12 capped brood ready to emerge. I am thinking that they are going to want to swarm again pretty soon.

The percentage of the first artificial swarms that mated successfully was lower than last year - we had 50% drone layers.

Ditto - exactly ditto, as I also had a 50% success/failure rate with the new queens. It has been very patchy, though, with overcrowded hives at the end of March/early April, then two or more weeks in May of no egg laying at all, even the best queen who is normally both hardy and prolific. Now they are out of the 6-frame nucs I gave to the splits, and quite crowded in the 14x12s. Two are building queen cells.

Possibly they have been thrown out of kilter by the odd age profile in the hive: lots of new brood compared with few newly emerged bees.

 

[barratt_sab]

We had a reasonable (good?) success rate with new queens (about 80%), but we have ASs that are ready to go round again - including one where we missed a QC and found our marked queen and another unmarked queen in the same hive last weekend (help, where's all the kit gone).

We don't have enough experience to know whether this is down to us, our bees, the weather or a combination of the three.