Combining swarms

Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum

Help Support Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Alma2

New Bee
Joined
Apr 27, 2021
Messages
9
Reaction score
0
Number of Hives
2
I am running out of kit but not pleas for help!
Picked up a swarm yesterday and rehoused it in a broodbox, but there is still a bit of room in there.
Have just had a call to pick up a football sized swarm.......

So my question is.....could I just dump them in the broodbox with yesterdays collection, dust them with icing sugar and let the queens fight it out?
 
Swarms apparently readily combine while they are swarming, I presume the queen's then fight on arrival at their destination. How soon they lose that swarm behaviour and would fight each other I don't know, but it sounds worth a try.
 
So my question is.....could I just dump them in the broodbox with yesterdays collection, dust them with icing sugar and let the queens fight it out?
No expert at this, as I literally just got my first three swarms over the weekend, but it's worked (so far) for me.
All were casts, so not very big. The first two went in their own nuc boxes, but as I didn't want all of my spare kit in use, the third got dumped in with the first swarm. No problems at all with fighting. I didn't use icing sugar, but just to be on the safe side, I did put an empty super on top of the first swarm box, and sprayed the inside of the super with air freshener before dumping the second swarm into the super. As soon as they'd made their way down between the frames of the brood box below, mingling with the other bees, I took the super off.
Of course, the likelihood is that at least two of them were swarms from the same hive (not mine! ;)) , given that they arrived just a day or so apart, and two of the swarms have a very similar darker black appearance. Don't know if that makes a difference?
Anyway, if I were to do this weekend over again, I would feel much more confident in just combining the swarms from the outset.
 
One can dump them together or find a queen and remove one first.
 
I guess you could drop the second swarm into a extra box on top of the 1st, with a queen excluder between, smoke them down through it, and remove the top queen. The smoke might make fighting between workers less likely, but might prompt absconding.
 
Last edited:
But the queens don't fight?
The bees do the deed?
apparently the bees stage manage the whole thing in a colony with multiple queens they just nobble the one they want to lose - they obviously must enjoy the spectacle!
sure it's much the same with a dump of swarms
 

Latest posts

Back
Top