Re: "lier or a fool"
have a band of capped honey all the way across the top?
difficult to break up that band of honey with a super above.
Well, that depends. If you throw out all the combs that are not populated in early spring, narrow the hive with a follower board, you sort of pressing the Bien up. In a Warré hive this is a build-in feature without follower board. You only have eight combs in a Warré and the combs are rather small in length.
1st year: ...Reproduction not on the agenda.
There are lots of swarms here that swarm again in their very first year. We even have a name for such swarms in German.
Two distinct varients: early supersedure and early wax making capability.
It is a pitty, that you can't read a German book written in 1905, which explains how the processes in a hive are driven by broodfood/Gelee royale. It does make a lot of sense what the author is writing about young bees and the need for those bees to feed brood in order to get rid of their food sap (Futtersaft in German) that is produced by their glands. And how brood feeding, drone raising and comb building are valves for their pressure. That pretty much explains a lot, including swarms in year one.
In that book "Der Bien und seine Zucht" by Gerstung, it is described that you can take one or two combs of capped brood and replace them with open brood combs from another hive, you can lower swarming tendencies that just started. From my experience it works pretty well and it also fits into the temperature related brood activity like shown in another thread. (Brood/bees relation.)
(Side note: in that book the MDA-splitter method is described as well, but without the on the spot queen rearing.)
NORMAL process. Knowing the normal process can help you plan your management.
CB taps one of those latent contingency plans from the past.
I reckon there is no such a "plan", which of course I understand just as a descriptive word for the processes taking place. I reckon the deep connection of the Bien to the outside world is by outside temperatures, which not only drives flight activities but also restricts brood cluster size in early Spring. Temperature is the main key for the understanding of the processes inside the hive and how the bees tune with the outside world. Plants and flowers depend on temperatures, too, and through outside temperatures all the natural processes organize themself and make a well organized concert.
I also bees are like humans a bit. Think of yourself foraging for walnuts or so. You easily get into the "squirrel mode" and you start hoarding like crazy. I do have a garden and I always get into that squirrel mode and overproduce where there is an opportunity to do so. Hoarding what I can get hold of.
Bees are not much different. Bees fly like crazy when there is a flow. In early Spring there is a lot of pollen and less nectar. So they hoard a lot of pollen. Especially if there are empty cells available.
Now, in nature the bees swarm with a certain number of bees, all well prepared (more or less) with provisions. The number of bees in that swarm define the number of cells that swarm builds initially. So the initial nest size is perfectly synchronized with the swarm size. The rest of the year the growth of the bees' nest is defined again by the number of bees in that colony, which of course is a perfect picture of the fertility of the queen.
Bottom line: nest size and comb size is perfectly tuned to each other.
The same is true for the brood to comb ratio. The first patch of brood is surrounded with a ring of pollen. The young bees emerging are eating up that pollen and by doing so, they free and clean and warm the cells for the queen to lay eggs into them. Perfectly tuned!
Now, modern hives are somewhat misshaped. The width of the combs provoke the bees to store nectar and pollen to the sides of that comb. While nectar is shifted around in the hive easily, pollen doesn't get shifted. It has to be eaten up by young bees. Bees prefer fresh pollen over old pollen.
In a modern hive bees tend to store too much pollen in early Spring which disrupts the development of the broodnest and young bees do not find enough acceptors for their food sap. They start to excrete wax plates and do start building comb as they start drone comb. Drones are a good sink for the too much food sap in a hive. Once this sink is full, the bees start "small hives" within the colony, means: queen cells. Queen cells also use up a lot of food sap.
So the management of the bees by the beekeeper is best achieved if you think in food sap and it's path through the hive. Just a try to figure it: 100 emerging bees produce food sap for let's say 500 larvae. 500 emerging bees produce food sap for 2,500 larvae. 2,500 for 12,500; 12,500 for 62,500...
It's exponential character points out, that there has to be an end to that growth somewhere, something has to happen!
First they try get rid of it by wax making, then by drone raising, by queen raising and finally by swarming and the founding of a completely new nest. Swarm bees build best. For a reason.
The only way to stop swarming is to add more acceptors (young brood), remove young bees/sap producers (capped brood, about to emerge), reduce the colony's growth by the removal of the queen, or to let them build a lot of comb.
(Another but rather poor possibility would be to let the bees starve, by reducing the pollen and nectar income. And in fact, pollen trapping for instance reduces swarming tendencies a little.)
Most certainly there are a lot of ways to achieve the above, managing the food sap, but of course some are more material+labour intensive, more disruptive than others. With a deep understanding of the processes you will find a good way to produce optimal honey harvests, which might be not the highest yields possible, but the most economical and efficient. Thus sustainable.
Sorry for the long post.
Bernhard