If anyone owns a copy of Beekeeping for Dummies, please reference pgs 150-151 for further elaboration--"Using an artificial swarm to prevent a natural swarm."
I shook some bees in one of my colonies to try to prevent a swarm, today. Not sure if it worked but looks good so far. Here's why I think my bees were prepping to swarm....
Inspected the hive, which is 4 deeps (yep, it's an experiment). Top two deeps weighed about 90 lbs each...that was fun to remove!
inch:
The bottom two deeps were woefully short of uncapped brood, lots of emerging brood, saw very few open brood, but on a couple frames I saw a few cells with eggs, not a lot, though. Found the queen with a green dot on her thorax, that tells you she's a year old. She looked slim like she was of flying weight.
I found about 15 queen cups in the swarm cell position (bottom of maybe 4-5 frames)...8 of these cups had an egg in them. One cup had a 3 day old larva in it.
The hive is about a week or two away from swarming, as I diagnosed it.
So here's what I did:
1. I tore out all the queen cups...yeah I know, I can hear beekeepers cringing and wincing all over America about this. Mike Palmer taught me to cut out/pinch queen cups with eggs or nothing in them. For cups with larvae/RJ in them, he teaches to search for the queen, and if no queen, then he says leave swarm cells alone.
2. Next, I split the hive into 2 two-deep bodies (one hive in the old location,...call this the old hive, and found the queen in one of the 2 splits.
3. I set the new hive directly on the ground about 10 feet away, then I shook out every bee onto a sheet in front of the bottom board, including the queen. Her majesty waltzed right in, followed by her court of about 20,000 workers + fat lazy drones. This is a variation of Blackiston's method as he shakes the workers out in front of their OLD home, including the queen. However, I figured that in a real swarm, the old queen LEAVES her OLD home for a NEW one. Which is why I shook my artificial swarm in front of the new split colony.
Again, my actions were predicated on my belief they were pending a swarm, based on the series of observations I found in the hive, described above. I did it hoping my actions would thwart a swarm, or as Blackiston says, "it gets the urge to swarm out of your colony's system."
Will let folks know the progress of this colony...i.e. did the artificial swarm work or no.
