{"id":8254,"date":"2011-06-16T14:18:19","date_gmt":"2011-06-16T13:18:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alananna.co.uk\/blog\/?p=8254"},"modified":"2011-06-16T14:22:59","modified_gmt":"2011-06-16T13:22:59","slug":"swarming-bees-followed-by-a-catch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alananna.co.uk\/blog\/2011\/06\/swarming-bees-followed-by-a-catch\/","title":{"rendered":"Swarming Bees – Followed by a catch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, our inexperience with beekeeping has been shown once again. I was hoping for a nice easy inspection today. We inspected last week<\/a> and reported that all was well in Clettwr but the bees in Leri had swarmed. Today I had hoped to have a quick check in Clettwr to make sure there were no signs of swarming, but to leave Leri alone so that the bees in there could get on with the process of re-queening.<\/p>\n

\"Queen<\/a>

Queen Cells<\/p><\/div>\n

As usual though the bees were having none of it and weren’t about to let me have an easy life. At first Clettwr seemed fine, plenty of bees and they were very docile, but then I came across a frame with queens cells on which are a sure sign that they are about to swarm. Not to worry, we had a plan. As long as the queen was still there, we were going to create a nucleus from the queen cells to hopefully prevent them from swarming.<\/p>\n

Creating a nucleus<\/h1>\n

One of the most commonly used methods to prevent swarming is to create an artificial swarm. This process requires an extra hive which we don’t have and it involves moving the queen complete with many of her attendants, into a new hive and putting this hive back where the original one was. The old hive complete with the colony, the queen cells, but not the queen is then moved to a different location in the apiary. Any flying bees then return to the queen in her new box and the new hive is housed somewhere else in the apiary.<\/p>\n

As we don’t have a spare hive we decided to create an nucleus which is very similar as far as I can tell and the end result certainly seems to be the same. The difference is that the queen remains in the original hive whilst a queen cell and many of the bees are moved to a new site in a nuc box. The nucleus needs to be quite strong in order to raise a queen from a queen cell so this reduces the population considerably in the original hive. It is hoped that the reduction in population will prevent the original colony from swarming and that the bees in the nuc box can rear a new queen and create a new colony.<\/p>\n

So, I found the queen, at least she was still there, move a frame with a decent queen cell into the nuc box, complete with its bees, I then moved a couple of other frames with brood, larvae and stores into the nuc box and shook a couple of frames worth of bees into it. Put the lid on, and placed the nuc box across the other end of the garden, about 10m away from the original hive with the entrance facing at right angles to that of the original hive. I also plugged the entrance with grass to stop the bees flying straight back to the original colony.<\/p>\n

I then replaced the frames I’d removed from the hive with new empty frames and put the hive back together. In hindsight I may not have shaken enough bees into the nuc box, but I had to do something and with no one there to help I had to make some decisions on the fly (with very little knowledge of what I was doing!)<\/p>\n

I stood back to look at the hives and think about what I’d done when I noticed thousands of bees streaming out of Leri, our other hive. I had hoped to leave this hive alone today but the bees were up to something – It looked as though they were swarming!!<\/p>\n

Swarm!<\/h1>\n

It was quite impressive to watch, I thought that this colony was fairly small as they had already swarmed once so was surprised to see quite so many bees leaving the hive. Once again it was less than a week since we’d checked them so I have no idea why they are swarming so much and so quickly, but swarming they were.<\/p>\n