Swarming is how hives reproduce, it has been an essential part of bees lives for millennia. It is, however, not an essential part of beekeeping.
It used to be. Back in the days of skep keeping, hives were expected to swarm, preferably multiple times, with the primary swarm being followed by after swarms, headed by virgins.
I was prompted to write about swarming after spending several hours today chasing swarms. The first one was at a local school and upon receiving a phone call about it I agreed to come and take it away. This is my first one of the season and I almost forgot to ask a few important questions.
Can I get my ute to it? More importantly, how high up is it? How long has it been there?
How long it has been there is important. A fresh swarm is generally very placid and I generally don’t use any protective gear (although I always have some handy). Onethat has been hanging in a tree for a week is likely to be far less friendly. It also pays to check that it is actually a swarm and not a hive i.e. it has already moved into a wall cavity.
Later in the season a lot of “swarms” also turn up in holes in the ground and these are almost invariably wasps, although I have seen two hives living in old rabbit holes. So, you can reckon on about .001% of these calls being accurate.
Anyway, I did eventually ask all the questions and drove for about 20 minutes across town to find that, A. I couldn’t get to it with my truck and B. it was six or seven meters up a tree where it was going to stay for the foreseeable future.
On the way home I got a phone call about a swarm just a couple of minutes from home in a retirement village and, as I already had the gear, I went to have a look. This one was low to the ground, but in a bush which makes it very difficult to get all the bees out. I snipped off a few branches and got most of the bees into my swarm box, which is just a full depth box with gauze on the bottom for ventilation and a sack with lid to seal them in.
Because I couldn’t get all the bees, I left it there with one corner of the sack turned back so they had an entrance, and popped back just before dark, flipped the lid on and took it home where I just opened up one corner again. They have two frames of foundation and I will leave them alone for three or four days. Any longer and they will make a mess of wild combs, but if you disturb them too soon they can abscond. Sometimes they do anyway. A frame of brood does help to hold them, but giving them nothing but foundation lessens any disease risk.
Disease isn’t a big risk in swarms, but why take chances.
I have captured many swarms over the years. I once found a fresh swarm in a cardboard box, which I put onto straight foundation. That’s all it got as it built up and it produced over 100 kg that year. In fact, it was such a good hive I use it for some breeding. Beautiful daughters that all swarmed.
Bees swarm to reproduce and the swarming urge is influenced by genetics, congestion, honey flow – or lack of it – and queen age. Personally, I have not found the second-year queens to be any worse than the first-year. In fact, if anything, they are slightly less inclined. If you only breed from two-year old queens that have never shown any tendency to swarm then you will get rid of a lot of your problems.
Get any hive congested enough in the spring and it will swarm. I can’t prove it, but I strongly suspect that shifting hives for spring pollination greatly reduces the urge to swarm. Maybe being shifted gives them the impression that they have swarmed.
I have found that, with good breeding and good practices, most swarming can be avoided, but the one thing that I’ve never fully got on top of is when there is a nectar dearth in November. In one area, particularly where there was a lot of broom pollen available, hives would raise cells, despite having plenty of room and sometimes very little honey. If they succeeded in swarming they would then throw off after swarms and you end up with a handful of queenless bees just as the main flow kicked in. As soon as any sort of honey flow started the swarming urge would disappear and some hives will even tear down swarm cells.
This dearth swarming is almost like absconding behaviour where the bees leave for greener pastures.
I knew some old-time beekeepers that controlled swarming by lifting the hive up and dropping it from a height sufficient to dislodge all the queen larvae. Not something I recommend, but it does show the importance of being gentle with your queen cells.
Early in the season the easiest thing is to squash all the cells (they can hide them in all sorts of places and more than 30 in a hive is not that unusual) and then swap the hive position with a weak hive. If this is swarming just caused by congestion, then breaking up the brood nest with alternate frames of foundation and lifting three to five frames of brood above the excluder, combined with squashing all the cells, will often work.
Dearth swarming is harder to control and you need to recheck them every seven or eight days. Remove frames of sealed brood if possible.
I initially check for swarming by splitting the two brood boxes and looking for swarm cells underneath. It’s not 100%, but you will find most swarming hives this way. If one hive is swarming then most likely a lot of other hives in the apiary will be as well.
When hives swarm I suspect the queen attracts a lot of the field bees in the vicinity and, where swarming is bad enough, even those hives that don’t swarm tend to lose most of their bees and this seems like a logical answer. Since varroa, swarming has been less of a problem simply because a lot of hives are just not up to it, but don’t think I always get things right. Like every beekeeper, I make mistakes. I once turned up at an apiary where we were a bit slow putting boxes on and there were 11 swarms hanging in the neighbouring trees.
We had one year where multiple yards in one area dearth swarmed to the point of most of the hives being completely useless for the season.
I have also seen one apiary where we used to leave a pallet of supers because of the difficult access in the spring and they had such a wonderful spring that some of them swarmed early into those boxes. You couldn’t see which hives they had come from and most of the boxes in the stack were full of honey.
My advice… Try to stop them. Don’t breed from them. Requeen them. A lot will supersede shortly after swarming anyway. And…
Don’t eat the royal jelly and grub from these wild swarm cells or you might end up with four boys, like me.
John Berry is a retired commercial beekeeper from the Hawke’s Bay, having obtained his first hive in 1966, before working for family business Arataki Honey and then as owner of Berry Bees. He now keeps “20-something” hives.
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