May 2024
Swarming time – Hanging onto your bees - Newsletter from Alan Riach
I expect a few of you will have seen the odd “charged” queen cell by now and hopefully have managed to Pagden successfully.
It is important that you avoid having swarms issuing from your apiaries, both from the honey production point of view and for civil responsibility reasons. Members of the public can be quite alarmed at seeing swarms in flight and having swarms settle on their premises.
You will often hear the terms swarm prevention and swarm control. Prevention is early actions taken to discourage swarming and swarm control is the action you must take once they have produced queen cells containing royal jelly and a larva. The two terms are often confused and to clarify, we often use the term “actions to discourage swarming” instead of the word “prevention” in the EMBA beginners class.
The principle behind artificial swarming is to consider the bee colony comprised of three entities – the queen, the brood and the flying foragers. Separating any one of these from the other two will prevent swarming. The Pagden method separates the brood from the queen and flying foragers. James Pagden outlined the basics of the system in his 1868 booklet “£70 a year. How I make it from my bees”.
Briefly, the Pagden method involves:
Moving the hive a metre or so to one side and placing in its original position a floor and broodbox containing frames with drawn comb (or foundation if you don’t have drawn comb). Place a queen excluder between the floor and the broodbox. Queen excluders can’t be left under the artificial swarm for too long, as they prevent the drones from exiting. Trap a postcard piece of paper sticking out between the lower edge of the broodbox and the queen excluder to remind you that the excluder is still there.
Find the queen and place her and the frame she is on in the centre of the new brood box on the original site (the frame she is on must NOT have any queen cells and ideally will be a frame of sealed brood.
This is the ARTIFICIAL SWARM.
Place the queen excluder on the artificial swarm and the supers – include empty supers if the originals are fairly full.
Install the cover board and roof – job done.
Now deal with the original hive (containing the charged queen cells)
Turn it through 180 degrees or move it somewhere else in the apiary.
Its flying bees will return to the artificial swarm, on the original site, weakening the original hive which is producing a new queen, sufficiently that it will not throw off cast swarms when the first virgin queen emerges. She will dispatch the unemerged virgins, go on a mating flight, and start laying in a few weeks.
Of course, there are other ways of artificial swarming and whichever one you use, ensure that you follow through all the required steps. This is particularly important if you use the Nucleus method, whereby the queen is separated from the brood and flying foragers. In this instance, the queen is put into a Nucleus box on a frame of brood, some frames of stores, some drawn comb, and some young bees. The parent hive is left with ONE queen cell – mark its location with a drawing pin on the top bar and treat that frame very carefully as the developing queen larva is only held onto the pool of royal jelly by surface tension. You MUST then go through the hive 6 days later, as the bees will have built lots of new queen cells on eggs and on young larvae. All of these must be destroyed, leaving ONLY your originally chosen cell. If you miss a second cell (usually a scrubby little entity hidden in the corner of a frame), you will guarantee a subsequent swarm when the first of the two subsequent queens emerges. If your chosen queen is first to emerge, she will be sent off with the prime swarm – you will be left with the poor queen emerging from that scrubby little hidden cell. The reason for swarming in this case is that the strong parent hive is still of the opinion that it can throw off a swarm. This is the danger associated with the Nuc artificial swarming method and is why we recommend the safer Pagden method. You can try other systems once you have gained more experience.
Even after Pagdening, the bees occasionally continue to produce queen cells. This may be supersedure due to a weak queen, but more likely due to the bees having been at an advanced stage of swarm preparation and the scouts may still be dancing for a new home. To guard against this, place a queen excluder under the new broodbox on the old site. Now, if the scouts do succeed in persuading the colony to swarm, the queen will not be able to exit and the bees will immediately return to the hive. If your colony is large during Pagdening and covering all frames on the super, then, as well as the norm of putting the super back on the artificial swarm, add another one or if there are flows of nectar in process, even better, two supers. See below for bees who have not read the books.
If you have missed a swarming and find a much-reduced colony with lots of queen cells, some sealed, some open, then reduce to one queen cell (preferably an open one with a nice fat grub therein as at least you know that is a good one) and mark its position, but remember you must check again after 6 days and knock down ALL other queen cells that may have been produced. This will prevent the bees from throwing off a cast swarm once the first queen emerges.
The Bees haven’t read the books.
If you find that your bees have not read the books and things don’t go exactly as described above, here are some scenarios that may happen even after you have Pagdened them and how to address them:
So, you carried out your Pagden artificial swarming operation, the queen was present, no queen cells were left, a queen excluder was placed under the broodbox containing the artificial swarm and when you inspected 1 week later, you found new charged queen cells, i.e. cells with royal jelly and larvae. What to do? Knock down these queen cells. Leave the queen excluder under the brood box and depart, complaining. One week later, inspect again. If everything seems normal, take out the queen excluder from under the brood box. Hopefully, they have now given up the swarming urge. However, if at the second inspection after having done your artificial swarm, there are still charged queen cells, now remove the queen and put her in a Nucleus box with a frame of brood, some frames of stores, some drawn comb, and some young bees. Now remove all the queen cells in the artificial swarm except one – mark with a drawing pin or other suitable marker on the top bar. Return after 6 or 7 days and knock down all new cells, leaving ONLY the marked cell.
Inserting brood frames with foundation into a broodbox
Some of you may be inserting new brood frames with foundation in various manipulations and rescued swarms in particular are very keen to draw comb. So, where to insert. If you are removing some old frames in a normal expanding brood nest, you will usually find on the outside, there are frames of sealed honey, then a frame with some honey and some pollen, then the first frame of brood. This pattern will be repeated on the other side of the brood nest. The best place to put the foundation is between the pollen comb and the first frame of brood, because the bees are already heating this area and you are not splitting the brood nest and forcing the bees to spread their warmth. Warmth is needed for comb drawing as the wax being manipulated has to be kept at quite a high temperature. A slowly expanding nucleus colony should be given one frame of foundation at a time; a rapidly expanding full-size colony can handle two. Once drawn and the queen is laying in the newly drawn comb, the process can be repeated. Throughout the season, identify the most decrepit frames, mark them with a drawing pin and gradually move them towards the sides of the hive. The following spring, remove them – if they still have honey at that time, break the cappings and the bees should remove it. If you are starting with a new 5-frame nucleus inserted into a full-size brood box, use the above rules of inserting foundation close to the warm brood area. You can restrict the space using dummy boards, but do keep an eye on the colony’s progress and move the dummy boards out ahead of the advancing nest.
For a video clip of the Pagden method, see https://www.scottishbeekeepers.org.uk/advice/bee-basics/how-to-prevent-honey-bees-from-swarming
