Why to join the swarm and the nuc

Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum

Help Support Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum:

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

Finman

Queen Bee
Joined
Nov 8, 2008
Messages
27,887
Reaction score
2,022
Location
Finland, Helsinki
Hive Type
Langstroth
.
Swarm get most or foragers from hive when swarm leaves. The rest are nurser bees and too youg to forage.
Later, before new bees emerge after 3-4 weeks, half of bees have died.

The nuc has brood but it has no other bee power to enlarge the hive. The progress is slow.

When you get a swarm, put them draw first foundations. The swarm fever will go away. It takes one week.

If you have a nuc, it s good to join it with swarm, and soon you will have a good foraging hive.

The system is same if you have false swarm and the rest brood hive. Join them to get honey. = Brood + nurser bees + foragers.

Without brood hive's power will collapse soon.
.
 
Thanks for that advice, will join my swarm back to its mother hive as soon as they have had a busy week building foundation, and stopped the itchy feet!!:)
 
I'd thought about doing that if I needed to make an artificial swarm (not had to yet thank goodness). But which queen would you recommend keeping?

Frisbee

In artificial swarm main purpose is that the queen continues laying and make forgagers for later season.
So it is better to make false swarm before queen cell capping because swarm often starts when first queen cells have been sealed.
If wing is clipped, it is the same thing because it is expencive to loose laying queen into lawn.

When the new queen lays, it is better to keep it because new queen seldom swarms again - unless hive is not full.

But for next summer it is not wise to keep swarm hive daugter because it swarms next summer quite surely.
 
Last edited:
A couple of things I had forgot in your post Finman.

I liked your post regards not keeping daughter due to being "Swarmy".
 
.

I liked your post regards not keeping daughter due to being "Swarmy".


Thanks for note and for that.

QUEEN REARING: When you make an atificial swarm, you have a good opportunity to rear queens in queen cells. Get a good origin larvae and change them in queen cells. You get really fat queens.

If you know a "big" beekeeper, who has good bee stock, ask from him a piece of egg comb and put it against skin under your shirt.

I have 20 hives but it is diffcult top find a good mother queen from that small group. It is better to find the best from 200 hives.

.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top