Did an artificial swarm...and then they went and swarmed anyway

[Mandeville]

rae - thanks so much - I'll go and do it now!

 

[Mandeville]

Done the inspection - saw a few QC and quite a bit of capped drone brood. Removed several of the QC and some of the drone cells.

Put another super on - the first was pretty full.

Now, I expect the answer is "just because they could" but ..... Why did my colony swarm when they still had one whole frame and one side of undrawn foundation in the BB?

 

[davidharradine]

Hi everyone

This has become a really interesting & useful thread - thanks for all thoughts and replies.

It has indeed been a case of the bees not doing what the bee books say they do, and I think that's a salutory lesson for us all - don't rely on the bees having textbook behaviour, as they don't, the buggers, they don't.

It's reassuring to hear other people's similar stories - means I'm not just a rubbish beekeeper after all!

I'm hoping that there are plenty of drones around waiting for my new queens (especially the "scrub queen", who I'm already quite fond of!) - I've had drones in my hive for a few weeks now.

Spring is upon us and don't the bees know it!

 

[terryme]

Sorry to crash this thread - but it is on the very topic I was about to post about. So, we saw 3 uncapped Qcells in our colony lastFri so did an AS on Sunday. The Qcells still uncapped and the q present and correct. The new hive on origial colony site etc. We left the 3Qcells - only bit I'm not so confident of now. Today we were told by an onlooker that there was a swarm at our apiary but that it appeared to have come from outside the site. It was not possible to retrieve it as it was over 30ft up a tree. The swarm left after an hour or so, don't know where it is now. There appeared to be lots of tussling between bees on the side of new colony hive - my feeling is that this was stragglers from the swarm trying to enter the hive but being snubbed. My husband is all for diving in and looking through the hives but I am more inclined to not fiddle about with them so soon...... what is your advice please? This is only our 2nd season of beekeeping so we are unsure and don't want to harrass our girls into leaving - our local beekeeping trainer did stress to us that the biggest pest and threat to bees is the keeper!

 

[rae]

It all depends on the strength of the colony. If it was big to start with, and you lost a swarm, then it has depleted many of the flying bees - but a large colony will replenish these quickly and issue casts with each virgin.

If you had uncapped queen cells last Friday, then it wasn't one of those queens that swarmed - they wouldn't have emerged yet.

So the question is how many queen cells you should leave. One argument (that I agree with) is that you should leave one or maybe two good ones. One is ideal from the point of view of cast prevention. Two is a good insurance policy in case one is duff, but you risk a cast. The other argument is that you should leave lots of queen cells and let the bees sort it out - but every time I have done that, I have got casts. I think it would be fine in a nuc, where the volume of bees is small, but in a full size colony, there will be enough bees to cast.

The ideal is to split the colony, with a queen cell in each box. That way, if something goes wrong with one of them, you have the other.

 

[terryme]

We are off to cull Qcells - unless we are too late!....