The Great Bee Breakout

I love this time of year - it’s full-on swarming time. Most animals have some annoying features: goats eat anything and everything, horses have riders, sheep eat grass and die (not necessarily in that order); bees sting and swarm. Of course, a swarm arriving from your next-door neighbour’s bees is a major plus - your bees going in the other direction definitely not.

How you try to control swarming depends on your attitude to your bees. If you’re in it for that lovely honey and the subsequent sale of same, I think you need to keep the hives boiling over with bees. Doing a split in anticipation of swarming is just the antithesis of this. A Demaree could well control swarming if it’s done properly - but you need an extra brood box, and your original one will become a super, heavy with honey.

Waiting until I see queen cells is my preferred approach. Then I’ll do a “lazy Snelgrove” or a proper modified Snelgrove.

Doing nothing is not an option, nor is knocking down queen cells. I think there’s a perception among some beekeepers that the queen controls swarming - not at all! It’s far more likely a collective decision, run by a quorum of bees (Tom Seeley shows that bees make decisions not by majority but by quorum - much like humans, really).

So, to swarm, the nurse bees make queen cups. I don’t know whether they move eggs into these or coerce the queen into laying in them, but eggs get in there. They reduce her feeding and effectively send her to the gym to slim down.

Foraging bees go house-hunting for the ideal home. In the hive, the drones are limbering up, maturing two weeks after emerging - totally unaware that their reproductive bits are inverted and that the denouement will be explosive. The hive is stuffed full of brood, ready to replace the troops that will leave with the old queen. Everything is buzzing.

This is why knocking queen cells is a futile occupation. There’s more chance of stopping my dogs from chasing rabbits - the bees have their bags packed and are raring to go. Knock down a queen cell and, four days later, there’s another ripe one - and off they go.

Worse still removing the old queen and reducing to one queen cell can be catastrophic. The bees will quickly build some more queen cells and when that first queen emerges swarming is back on again but much worse. You have introduced a time delay so that many more young bees have emerged (those that would have replaced the departing bees) plus you now have a young fit bitch of a virgin queen race fit unhampered by gravid ovaries, when she goes out with the swarm she can fly a long way and will, a small cumulus nimbus cloud of bees disappearing over the horizon. 

The old queen, a tired old matriarch still gravid, would have struggled reluctantly out of the hive, quickly tired, and settled out on a nearby bush surrounded by her cohort of bees. Scout bees left to go off in search of a new home. 

There are beekeepers that will tell you they never lose a swarm; smile sweetly at them and make a mental note never to take their advice. I have seen swarms emerge from a hive at eight o’clock in the morning; I have seen a hive swarm but leave the old queen still in the original hive, a hidden queen cell having hatched, the old queen, with clipped wings, managed to evade the deadly intentions of her daughter and the new queen left with a swarm instead, and no, I never saw that swarm again, it flew off into the far distance.

Finally insects are divided up into three different orders: Stingers, biters and itchers. Beekeepers are divided up into two orders: fantasists and those that admit to losing an occasional swarm.