Swarm Prevention
Encourage the queen to stay at home
Having learnt about collecting swarms, this is about preventing them in the first place.
Some methods involve changing the natural balance in the colony.
When starting with a nuc in June, there is a low risk that they will swarm, but ensure the colony has enough space.
Throughout the spring and summer, a beekeeper spends more time monitoring and managing swarming than anything else. It is too late once a colony has started on the swarming trajectory. To stop a colony that is swarming, the colony is usually weakened; if they swarm early, say goodbye to a decent honey crop. Hence, the value of prevention methods to keep the colony together. One large colony produces more honey than two moderate ones.
I find the terms pre-emptive and proactive swarm control confusing. So, I’ll refer to swarm management techniques as:
Prevention, which is doing something to stop swarming from ever happening; it’s prophylactic, pre-emptive like an immunisation. And control, which is doing something to prevent the situation from getting worse that will lead to a cure, like isolating everyone who gets an infectious disease.
To completely prevent swarming is a bit optimistic; it depends on what and when you do something and a bit of good luck. Young queens in their first year swarm less frequently. But all bees attempt to swarm. It’s what they do.
The Initiation of Swarming
To understand swarming, it helps to appreciate the roles of pheromones (scent messages).
Queen Mandibular Pheromone (QMP) is critical in swarming. Weaker queens produce less Queen mandibular pheromone (QMP). That’s simplistic, as QMP has five main chemical components whose proportions vary during a queen’s lifecycle. In the normal life of a colony, messenger bees assimilate QMP by licking and antennating the queen’s (Q’s) mandibular gland. They pass it to other bees by sharing food, at which time they stroke their antennae. If the hive becomes congested, the bees and the queen move more slowly, and the workers at the periphery experience a reduction in QMP levels. A fall in QMP results in a greater risk of swarming.
Tergal pheromone is synergistic to QMP in swarming initiation. It is released from the feet of bees as they walk. The chemical structure of the queen’s pheromone is different from the others and suppresses the formation of swarm cells.
Congestion: Based on some science, a simplistic belief is that swarming can be prevented by giving the bees plenty of room. But despite constantly feeding them comb, they still swarm. They swarm even when there isn’t an arc of stores, queen excluder, or nectar above the brood nest. Rusty Burlew explains why preventing congestion does not work.
QMP has broad effects, so for example, a fall in QMP is contiguous with a reduction in open brood (caused by the workers feeding the queen less food). We know little more than this.
An American called Walt invented a method of swarm prevention called checker boarding, which he claims is 100% effective because it prevents the block to brood expansion. The method requires prolific bees or at least energetic young queens.
Swarming initiation takes place several weeks before the colony throws up queen cells. By the time the brood pattern changes, swarming is inevitable.
You should/could stop them swarming if you get them through their reproductive to their store gathering stage.
Factors that are associated with swarming
1. Time of year: occasionally late March, plenty in April, maximal in May and June, some in July, rarely in August and September.
2. Presence of drones in the swarming season, 9 -20% of bees in a wild colony are drones. A colony’s priority is spreading its genes, not making honey. Peak drone production occurs three weeks before swarming, but don’t count on it. The queen, on plastic frames, will only produce plenty of drones when you give her a frame without foundation or a frame of drone comb.
3. Strong enough: This depends on how prolific your bees are. Mine will have ten frames of brood. Once, I had a swarm with six.
4. Plenty of queen cups, more than twelve.
5. Maturity / Constriction of the brood nest. Once there is a bit of back-filling, a little nectar in the upper or lower corners of the frames, the colony may swarm within three weeks.
6. Cold weather causes bees to hang around in the warm brood nest, and this causes congestion: 2.3 bees/square cm rather than 1.25/square cm will precipitate QC production, so check colonies as soon as the weather improves. Be quick! They may swarm by late morning.
7. Some stores indicate the maturity of the colony, but they are not an absolute necessity.
8. Recordings with specialist equipment and accelerometers inside the hive. Swarming can be predicted up to 30 days before the event with 90% certainty. Only researchers have used this method.
9. The queen’s age: 2nd year or more
10.“Splitting the brood” apparently, by putting a drawn or undrawn frame in the middle of the brood nest of a minor to moderate sized colony, it reduces the area for the queen to lay.
11. Genetics: some bee races, like Carniolans, are reputed to be more prone to swarming.
12. Anything that results in the bees sensing less QMP.
13. Plenty of young bees are required to comprise a swarm.
14. A honey flow in the spring or early summer keeps them busy. I don’t know whether this is real.
15. The queen has a lack of space to lay.
16. Using poly hives
Ways to reduce the risk of swarming
I’ve made a pretty list, but the most important factors are having a young queen and ensuring the colony has enough space to expand; despite this, they still swarm.
Wing clipping - see below
Let them draw wax / Space
A good strain of bees
Equalising brood between colonies
Young queen or two queens in one colony
Wing Clipping
This lies somewhere between prevention and control. Cutting off up to half of one of the queen’s longer wings makes her a weak flyer. Maybe she manages to fly a little way but soon drops to the ground, or she goes nowhere and crawls under the hive. The bees return home when they realise the queen is not with them.
Some beekers loathe maiming their bees; others swear by it. Should the clipped queen be lost, the colony has to wait for a virgin queen to emerge and then swarm with her, but meanwhile, you can do something to stop them.
To use this technique successfully, use a large landing board and do a severe clip of one wing (50%). This way, you should not lose the queen, and since she can crawl back into the hive. If she ends up under the hive with some bees, put a receptacle under her, dismantle the hive so that you can rattle the floor.
Clipping does not seem to affect the queen’s longevity or capacity. Insects are precious but single-use. Scientific investigation with accelerometers shows a different pattern after she has been clipped. Learn to clip wings without picking up the queen.
2. Space: Drawn Comb
A colony needs space because every activity requires drawn comb: space for brood, room for the queen to lay, a place for dumping and curing nectar, and storage. Undrawn combs do not count as space. Bees in the wild, to generalise, like to have a cavity-sized 40 litres. They are happy with a smaller volume than we give our bees because they want to reproduce.
Wally Shaw recommends putting frames of foundation at the edges of the brood nest in a honey flow. This will encourage them to draw comb. It has not worked for me using plastic frames. I recommend you try using wax foundation. Theoretically, if there is a honey flow, their initial priority is not drawing comb but processing nectar. Once the congestion with nectar is too great, they start drawing comb, so this is the correct timing. Give it a go and watch what happens.
3. Good Bees
The mating of two strains of a plant or animal results in something with “hybrid vigour”. This is true of F1 vegetables and of a bee called a Buckfast. It is gentle and less likely to swarm in its first year. They do not breed true, so new stock must be procured every year or two, which is terrific for queen bee suppliers. Most beekeepers have docile, productive bees that are mongrels, not hybrids.
4. Box under the Brood Box
This is a fiddly caper. The box contains frames with starter strips interspersed with 3–4 frames of foundation. By maintaining space in the box, the bees do not feel cramped, so they don’t swarm. To achieve this, remove frames before they are completed. My bees tend to draw drone combs, which make lovely super frames. Bees do not store pollen in drone comb.
Do this before queen cups begin to be built. It is best done in the autumn, otherwise in February. In BeeBoxes (as with most other hives), there is a space between the bottom of the frames and the floor. It fills with comb attached to the bottom bars of the frames. Carve this off in the autumn. Otherwise, this technique means disturbing the colony, carving off comb smothered with bees, all when the weather is cool. Once in place, the setup does not need checking until the first inspection.
5. Rotating Brood Boxes
There is a natural tendency for bees to move their brood nest down. It is often believed to be the opposite. Both are true; the brood nest will expand wherever they have the space, usually out and up. It must depend on the time of year. Logically, bees in poly hives cluster at the top of the hive in the autumn and move downwards in the spring flow to make space for stores. Assuming you have bees that move down and a hive composed of two brood boxes, and the top box has little brood, you create room for the queen to lay by reversing the boxes. If you believe the brood nest moves up, and it certainly will if you don’t give them another option, rotate!
When there is a band of stores above the brood, you can remove it by box rotation.
I can’t imagine that rotating boxes makes much of a difference. It hasn’t been for me. Indeed, I’ve read that it postpones swarming by two weeks.
6. Spreading the Brood
This takes minimal time. If you like fussing, do it. The concept is that you move one frame (that contains the most brood) to the edge of the brood nest. Hence, the adjacent comb is kept warm, and the queen lays in it. Repeat the manoeuvre every week. Pyramiding is somewhat similar.
7. Equalising Brood between Colonies
By doing this, there is a chance that colonies will do much the same thing simultaneously. Strong colonies will swarm later, and small ones sooner. Big colonies will share their diseases with the little colonies and vice versa. similar.Bee brood is difficult to chill, but if too much brood is transferred to a weak colony, it may not have enough bees to keep it warm. Brood can be easy to miss in a dark comb if you are rushing. When larvae are chilled, brood of all ages goes black/brown/grey. Naturally, check the colonies for disease before you move frames.
As a rule, don’t move more than two frames at a time between colonies.
8. Split or Demaree (or a Pagden)
Preventive manipulations like these are the methods that work best. Other manipulations are mostly for control.
A split divides a hive in two. Typically, one portion receives more brood, and the portion with the queen receives less.
Demaree: keeps the colony together and can be used to make increase.
To do manipulations early in the year, some beekeepers recommend stimulating the colony by giving sugar syrup in March. This may help bees living in wooden hives, but it is definitely a bad idea for colonies in poly hives, which naturally build up rapidly, perhaps too rapidly. Colonies build up so rapidly, so they swarm early. Moreover, feeding in March will be too early for bees living in the North of the UK.
The chief concern is that if they do not use the syrup immediately and the weather becomes cold, they are unable to process it. I don’t know the size of the risk. People say it works. So don’t let me put you off. In the South East, queens have a reasonable chance of mating in May, but not so good in April.
9. Give them a honey flow during the expansion phase
Once a large colony hits the storing season, they are focused on foraging, so swarming is less of an issue (famous last words). But if there is a hiatus in the honey flow, it leaves many foragers bumming around with nothing to do, and worse, this causes congestion of the brood nest. Keenly observe the amount of nectar they are processing. In the June gap, only feed if required, and don’t feed them too much. You don’t want sugar syrup in the supers, or your honey will resemble Golden syrup.
10. Chequerboarding
It involves using prolific bees, ten frames of stores and at least ten frames of comb—the more, the better—so it requires planning. Rusty Burlew explains why it works. Walt Wright devised this manipulation, and you can read his explanation. Then, you might like to make your brain spin: page 1, page 2, page 3. The frame configuration must be set up during the winter (nine weeks before apple blossom to prevent swarming in April).
This is the only technique that “guarantees a large harvest” and no swarming if you get it right. But nothing is 100%. Once set up, inspections can be minimal. It is not for beginners. The brood nest will fill three boxes without a queen excluder.
It did not work for me. By April, eleven frames of bees were present in the middle two boxes, with none elsewhere.
11. Disrupt the brood nest / Pyramiding
In a strong colony, sandwich frames without foundation (wooden frames in the photo) between frames of brood. This colony had 17 frames of brood and five queen cups. It still swarmed.
Pyramiding may be advantageous when the bees don’t move up and give themselves some room. It is rather like box rotation. Several brood frames are moved to the top box. The rest go in the bottom box. The bottom box brood frames intermingle with frames of comb. My bees come out of winter on two brood boxes already, so it’s an irrelevance. Perhaps it helps nucs to expand. Randy Burlew explains.
Grey = brood frames, green = comb.
Some beekeepers regard this method as unsound, reasoning that splitting the brood makes a colony more likely to swarm. Considering this, wait until the hive is thronging with bees, by which time they are planning to swarm.
12. Young Queen
Whilst a two-year-old queen may be a better layer, younger queens output plenty of pheromones and are more vigorous. Running a two-queen hive helps. The Chinese manage seven queens in a hive by removing one of their mandibles.
Some people believe a queen excluder is a honey excluder.
f you start with a nuc in June, they are unlikely to swarm that year as long as they have ample space and are not too prolific. Then the fun starts:
Received wisdom states that a queen in her first yearly rarely swarms. Mine inevitably swarm unless I split early in the spring. Demaree is currently my favourite method. I have tried Buckfast and other strains, and they swarm. I’ve given them loads of room, and they swarm. I’ve tried most preventative measures and they fail. I suppose it’s me.
Many beekeepers don’t have my problems, or don’t let on if they do.
13. Not using a Queen excluder
Some people claim that a queen stop is a honey stop. If there is a box of honey above the brood boxes, this should act as a QE. However, the Q sometimes lays up through the supers like a chimney. If this happens and I cannot find the queen at harvest time, it makes me feel insecure, and prohibits using clearer boards. Bees find it less of a squeeze to get through some excluders than others. My metal slotted excluders look better than my plastic ones. Before you rush to buy new excluders note that some people say that slotted excluders damage the bees’ wings. I haven’t noticed a problem. Most people use queen excluders and their bees do fine.
Prevent swarming and make honey
Three ideas for a honey crop
Do an early Demaree. Start it early, before they start swarming, and repeat it later. Bees in (my) poly hives regularly swarm in the first week of April. A vertical Pagden or split cannot be done until May. A Demaree is easy even with numerous bees; it is nice to see the queen and keep her safe, but whatever people say, you can do a Demaree without finding the queen, and it is difficult to do it wrong.
Most beekeepers work out what method suits them and have never done a Demaree. But don’t let that put you off!
Effective varroa control – summary
Clip your Queens’ wings
Next, what to do if prevention has failed and a colony is making swarm preparations.
Page 6.
