Unsuccessful Swarming and a Bait Hive Blunder

by Alan Cole · Published Friday, July 8th, 2022 · Updated Friday, July 8th, 2022

Unsuccessful Swarming

We never have much success with our bees during swarming season. As soon as there are signs of swarming we tend to do the standard artificial swarm procedure. This is supposed to ‘trick’ the bees into thinking they have swarmed and you should end up with two colonies:

One containing the original queen and the flying bees, just as if they had swarmed.
Another containing queens cells and nurse bees – those that would be left behind after a swarm had left.

Performing the artificial swarm always goes well. However, usually a few days later the original queen swarms anyway leaving behind an even smaller colony with no queen cells. The bees that are left behind usually build an emergency queen cell but that wasn’t the plan. We would probably have been better off simply not doing anything.

Meanwhile, in the other half of the split, the new queen hatches and she often swarms too. Again she takes half the colony with her and leaves us with another queenless colony, this time with no eggs and no chance of survival.

Despite the fact that it doesn’t work, we do it every year as that is the perceived wisdom. We have tried a few other things.

We’ve tried splitting them before there are signs of swarming, but that didn’t work.
We’ve left them to swarm and have then caught the swarm. Again, despite catching the swarm and rehousing it, the queen still leaves with half the colony when we try this, or the entire colony goes AWOL.
We’ve just let them swarm and haven’t worried about catching them. This ‘works’ but doesn’t actually achieve anything positive!

I’m not really sure what we should do, in over 10 years of bee-keeping I don’t think we’ve ever had an artificial swarm work properly. We do usually end up with newly hatched and mated queens eventually. But these are in a much reduced colony. We also end up with a small queenless colony as well. At least we are able to merge these to form a half decent sized queenright colony to take into the winter. What we don’t get is much in the way of honey from any of them or any additional colonies.

Bait Hive Blunder

Another thing we always do during swarming season is leave a bait hive or two nearby. This is simply a hive or a nuc box with some empty frames in it that the bees might decide would be a suitable home. The idea is that if a colony does swarm it might end up in the bait hive rather than flying off somewhere else. We might therefore catch the swarm without really trying.

Again, this has never worked. A few days before the swarm departs the bait hives are always quite busy. Presumably this is scouts out checking for suitable homes. That’s all it usually comes to though. This year I didn’t put a bait hive out properly but I did leave some old equipment out near to the house. I had these spare hive components closed up over winter but I did open them up for the summer just in case. They had in a way become an accidental bait hive.

Prior to the first signs of swarming this season this ‘accidental bait hive’ did indeed get some attention. I artificially split the colony that was about to swarm as usual and the attention died down. I’m fairly certain that the original queen in the split still swarmed anyway but they didn’t take up residence in the bait hive. No surprises there – on both counts! There were actually reports of the swarm heading SE!

I then decided that as we now had 3 colonies in the garden we couldn’t really house anymore. There was the two half colonies from the artificial split – both of which were now queenless and waiting for new queens to hatch. There was also a very large colony on a double brood that was likely to swarm sometime soon. Not really having the space or the equipment to house another colony I decided it was best to just leave them to it and allow them to swarm this year. We would at least hopefully end up with a new 2022 queen if we did that -assuming of course that one hatched and successfully mated.

Typically, the large colony does seem to have swarmed. However, for the first time ever they may well have taken up residence in the accidental bait hive. Typical, the one time I didn’t want to catch the swarm as I didn’t have the capacity to keep it they seem to have caught themselves!

What isn’t ideal is that the accidental bait hive is right next to the conservatory. It’s therefore very close to the house and has effectively cut of a thoroughfare to the back of the house. We do have a nice view of them from the bedroom window though!

Options

Not a massive problem as ‘catching’ the swarm in the accidental bait hive does give us options. We can decide to keep the queen and the colony. This might be a good idea but moving it somewhere suitable might not be easy. Or, we could merge it with another colony later in the year. That will depend on how well the other colonies get on during the rest of the summer.

I haven’t actually inspected any of the hives for a few days so I’m not 10% sure what’s going on but as usual the bees seem to be keeping to their own agenda and keeping us on our toes.