How to stop your honey bees from swarming UK

Swarming is a bee colony's means of reproduction. When a bee colony swarms the queen leaves with some workers and starts a new colony.

This is a natural process and normally happens between May and July in the UK.

It can be rather frustrating for a bee keeper as you lose the queen and sets your colony back a few weeks until they have a new one. 

This can lead to reduced honey crop and if they swam late in the year they might not be able to build up stores for the winter. 

How to stop a hive from swarming:

• Remove swarm cells
• Add more space to the hive
• Split the hive

Removing swarm cells

Bees will only swarm when they feel the colony is strong enough or if they have ran out of space in their current location for all the bees.

Bees will get ready to swarm by creating new queen cells. Seeing these in your hives is a good indicator that your bees want to swarm.

One way to prevent a colony from swarming is by breaking these cells down as a colony is unlikely to swarm without knowing there is a new queen on the way.

This won't guarantee your colony won't swarm as it doesn't remove the colony's urge to swarm but instead delays it. 

Adding more space

Another way to prevent bees from swarming is by giving them more space. Bees will swarm when they have run out of room in their current location. Once the bees feel they have more space they are less likely to swarm. Ways to provide a bee colony with more space:

• Adding a super box - giving a colony more space can be as simple as adding an additional box to your hive.
• Harvesting honey.
• Rotating or adding undrawn frame - adding new undrawn frames will mean the bees have to draw new comb (this is also good for the hygiene of the hive)

Splitting the hive

Both of the approaches already spoken only reduce the chance of swarming, they aren't a guarantee. Sometimes a colony's drive to swarm is so great that doing these measures doesn't stop the hive from swarming.

The best way to prevent as colony from swarming is by splitting the hive. This is effectively an artificial swarm and by splitting the hive in two you remove the colony's drive to want to swarm. 

You weaken the colony enough that the bees' swarm response is completely removed. 

After you have split the colony you can either keep two colonies or combine them back together.