Beesource Beekeeping Forums banner

swarming- why?

3K views 8 replies 7 participants last post by  ryandebny 
#1 ·
my bee yard has 11 hives and there have already been 3 swarms that I know of. Doesn't this seem like an awful lot for hives started this spring with 5 frame nucs? I'm a complete novice but my mentor who owns 9 of the hives has worked for 3 commercial apiaries over the years and he doesn't understand it either.

The details:I live in northern Minnesota, 9 8 frame hives and 2 10 frame hives. No drawn comb except what was in the nuc packages. nucs installed May 1st. This is bear country so all 11 hives are in a 16x16 area surrounded with cattle panels and electric fence. The first swarm left the capture hive and went native. The 2nd and 3rd have stayed but we added a couple frames of brood to the capture hives. The swarms don't appear to be abandoning the original hives but splitting. The swarms have been spaced about a week apart with the latest swarm happening on June 28th. That one was my first solo swarm capture as my mentor is out of town. It was a wet drizzly day, no extra hive bodies so I had to construct a brood chamber body from plywood to house the 10 spare frames I had before I could even start. No protective gear except the smoker. I was expecting to take a few hits especially with the weather. waited for a lull in the rain and did the capture... managed to avoid getting stung to boot :D installed a top feeder with 1:1 last night to give them a boost building comb and they seem to be settling in to stay.

It's cool that I just doubled the number of hives I own because I had the funds to buy new hives, but if this keeps up I'm going to have to let some future swarms go native for lack of hives to house them in.

Eye_Mac
 
See less See more
#4 ·
My understanding is that bees will typically swarm when their current hive is fully filled, there is a flow on, and there are enough bees for both hives (the original and the swarm) to have a good chance of survival. Naturally, this will vary with the different genetics of the queens, but by and large and crowded hive with full storage will throw a swarm on a nectar flow. Early spring is normally when hives swarm, but allowing them to get over-stuffed at any time can result in a swarm, even a new hive from a package.

There are a number of ways to avoid this, cheapest and easiest is to not allow them to fill up the hive with honey. Remember, a full hive is a signal to make a new one, so if you keep empty comb over the brood nest by adding boxes, adding empty frames and removing full ones, or exctracting and putting empty boxes back on, they won't get the signal that it's reproduction time.

I would suspect you needed to add more space sooner than you did, but it's possible you just got swarmy bees.

Peter
 
#6 ·
Thank you Michael and Radar,

I am guessing these are reproductive swarms. I'll try to capture the ones I can :) I'm not too crushed about the ones that escape, here in Northern MN we do not have enough wild honey bees in large part due to very harsh winters.

Eye_Mac
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top