[McBee7]

-------In 2019 I learned I will never again say------

"My bees don't swarm"

While tending to my bee yard near a county road, a walker came by and asked if I had caught that swarm of bees in the bushs just over there. I told him that my bees don't swarm because of proper management, blah, blah, blah, to which he told me there was another one the size of a basketball in that same bush a week earlier, after which he flip flopped his way down the road.....

As I went through my hives and seeing half the bees in some of the box's I knew I had been drinking my own kool-aid to long :/

===McBee7===

 

[kilocharlie]

Yeah, "tendency to swarm" / "buildup rate" / "hive volume" are all related, as well as nectar-pollen feeding capacity of the bee lot, and other factors such as bee comfort, pests, etc., that can drive bees from an area.

Bees swarm. They are programmed by millions of years of colony survival.

 

[BernhardHeuvel]

Simply breed for less swarming.

How do you recognize a less swarm bee? (No, you don't count swarm cells.)

Simple as that: the queen continues to lay eggs although swarm cells are drawn. That is the behavior you looking for. And to select for.

Queens that slow down on egg-laying or even shut down egg laying when swarm cells are drawn, that are the "swarmy bees", with a stubborn and unstoppable will to swarm. Even if you are successful in hindering the swarming, the broodnest is shut down. And this reduces the honey harvest from the current and the next nectar flow. (As does splitting, removing the queen and other rather helpless methods of "swarm prevention"...)

The broodnest is the honey pump. Not only it is the passover and takeover place for incoming nectar, 25 % of the food the food glands of young nurses go into feeding foragers. With less young bees and nurses present, the forage force runs out of quality fuel.

The functioning broodnest is actually most important to make honey. Course you can play here and there, removing the broodnest at the end of a flow, shuffling frames, placing empty combs in between. But all that fiddling costs a lot of unnecessary labour. It is unnecessary and less successful than a good functioning broodnest.

Of course all bees want to swarm. But there are huge differences on HOW bees swarm. The one will shut down the broodnest. Others don't. While removing swarm cells helps a lot in bees with a low swarming tendency, it is useless in swarmy bees. The only cure for swarmy bees is to remove the old queen. Which is as bad as swarming, because in either case the broodnest is shut.

So breed for less swarm willing bees. Harvest more honey, have much less trouble beekeeping. It is easy to select for, simply watch the queens behavior.

 

[SueBeeTN]

:lpf: Thanks for sharing!

 

[Michael Palmer]

What would I recommend in selecting bees with a lower propensity to swarm? Stop using colony division as the default swarm control method. Use hive manipulations instead...reversing and proper supering. Then, colonies that show continued swarm preparations are removed from the breeding list, and managed more intensely for swarm control. The strong colonies that never show swarm preparations when others do, are what you are looking for. These go on the breeder list until you find some other reason to remove them from the list.

 

[kilocharlie]

Thank you Bernard! Thank You Michael!

Did everybody read that? Those two posts just really gave a lot of valuable information.

Proper supering was discussed by Ormond Aebi in his book, The Art and Adventure of Beekeeping back in 1975. Eugene Killion shows the same supering order in his book, Honey ion the Comb.
The second super goes under the first. The third goes in between 1 & 2. The 4th goes between 2 & 3. Read Ormond Aebi's book. It explains what his father, Harry reasoned when he invented this sequence.

 

[BernhardHeuvel]

The second super goes under the first.

I work up to hundred hives a day on my own. I would break in half, if I had to lift all those supers...

There is a better way to do it. It is the Brother Adam hive. Square hive, means you can rotate it 180°. In combination with the adapted broodnest, that method produces even better results than under-supering. It is the same principle as under-supering, but much less work. I go and draw some sketches for you.

 

[BernhardHeuvel]

So you still "open up" the broodnest, under-super...and so on. Just much easier. Simply turn the super 180° when there is the first nectar in the topmost super. Add another new super on top. That boosts nectar foraging and the will to replace the "lost honey dome" overhead.

Works great in a Brother Adam hive. Because the broodnest is on one side of the brood box. And it is square.

That method is handed down by some professional beekeepers in Germany who claim that Bro Adam showed it to them. :shhhh:

For me it is labour saving and it really pushes up honey production. As most does, what Bro Adam thought out. :thumbsup:

 

[kilocharlie]

I love that Brother Adam beehive, also known as the Modified Square Jumbo Dadant beehive, and those of us on this side of the pond using it owe a great debt to you, Bernard, for giving us so much of the yearly routine of it's management. That was in a previous thread by Fusion Power, and so thanks again to both of you.

 

[BernhardHeuvel]

I wrote the monthly articles on beekeeping in the Adam hive in our beekeeping magazine. They put the articles online and you find them here: https://www.bienenundnatur.de/aktuelles/das-war-das-bienenjahr-2019-mit-bernhard-heuvel/

You can translate the linked PDFs by downloading them and sending it through the google translator. https://translate.google.de (You can upload PDFs there to translate them). Don't know how the translator works on beekeeping terms. When I get some spare time, I'll translate the articles properly.

I owe you people here on beesource some of my knowledge. Learned a heck from Mike Palmer. Also you pointed me to the Traveling Beekeeper articles. I learned about some very useful stuff on queen rearing there, when he reported about the Miksa family business. Made my queen rearing a tremendous success story.

So like in a hive, the trophallaxis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophallaxis) works great. Passing back and forth information, that through actual practical usage becomes knowledge.

Thanks for that, beekeepers.

 

[crofter]

I work up to hundred hives a day on my own. I would break in half, if I had to lift all those supers...

There is a better way to do it. It is the Brother Adam hive. Square hive, means you can rotate it 180°. In combination with the adapted broodnest, that method produces even better results than under-supering. It is the same principle as under-supering, but much less work. I go and draw some sketches for you.

Bernhard;

Should this not be rotate 90 degrees ?

 

[BernhardHeuvel]

The super is sitting at an 90° angle to the brood frames. Before adding another super on top, I rotate it 180°. So it sits again at an angle of 90° to the brood frames.

 

[kilocharlie]

Yes, I previously referred to Ormond & Harry Aebi's supering sequence for United States Standard Langstroth 10-frame equipment. It is so prevalent here.

The Brother Adam hive, which I do not yet fully understand, is already making 2.2 times the honey of my best colonies in American Standard Langstroth beehive boxes. I'll have bees to split and breed from again in a few years. I originally went from 3 swarms my first year to 49 colonies 6 years later, and that after losing my first 7 to a poison spray tractor, a crazy woman burned all my wood, and I had numerous tools stolen.

The bee biology and logistic advantages of the Brother Adam beehive, combined with the beekeeper advantages males it a bee factory - a breeder's resource production dream.

The modifications that Fusion_power made to it (seven 1.240 inch wide frames and 5.1 mm cell size) brings up the bee population 2 weeks earlier to take better advantage of the Spring nectar flow. Now, THAT'S MONEY. So many bees I HAVE to go to the almonds. The power of that kind of brood nest is almost unbelievable, but I must admit, that seems so because I started on these standard beehives that are just too small.

 

[McBee7]

VERY COOL- to all and thanks for the input :}

----Now here is the 2nd thing I learned that I will never say again ----

--Who stole my hive tool!---

----I've learned that it's "me" -- NOT Mr flip-flop ;-O

,,,,,And the solution is to saturate my world with hive tools so I will always have one when I need it.....

I've learned a lot this year ,,,and next year I'll work on my sentences and punctuation and spelling

----LOL---

===McBee 7===

 

[elmer_fud]

VERY COOL- to all and thanks for the input :}

----Now here is the 2nd thing I learned that I will never say again ----

--Who stole my hive tool!---

----I've learned that it's "me" -- NOT Mr flip-flop ;-O

,,,,,And the solution is to saturate my world with hive tools so I will always have one when I need it.....

I've learned a lot this year ,,,and next year I'll work on my sentences and punctuation and spelling

----LOL---

===McBee 7===

I think I am up to 6+ hive tools. I do use 2 at a time when I am checking a hive.