[Poptart]

When do bees swarm. Do they swarm whenthe swarm cells are capped. Do they swarm when the new queen is about to emerge. I know there will be many different answers but just curious to everyones opinion. I've got one hive I'm going to look at this morning that I discovered swarm cells in late last night. Time to cut out Queen cells and make nucs with them. Going to try and find the old queen and put her in a nuc. I'll post later on my findings. P.S. the cells I found in this hive were all capped. Hope I'm not to late!!!!

 

[Iddee]

Swarm season is here. Most times she will swarm about two days before the new queen emerges. The reason you will get many answers is because the bees don't read the rule book. They vary their actions, so there is no one definite answer.

Find the queen and move her with the nuc if at all possible, or she will swarm from the original site. As for cutting out cells, be sure you leave a couple in the original hive.

I remove cells for nucs, but I never cut out out and destroy queen cells for swarm prevention. It doesn't work. It only leaves the hive with no way to make a queen after they swarm. They will swarm anyway.

 

[Poptart]

Update! Just got done with the swarm hive! Too late! Old queen had already left! But I was able to make four nucs off the hive. I did find Open queen cells in the hive! So if anything maybe I prevented after swarms. And no I didn't destroy any queen cells. Cut them out and pushed them into drawn comb in the nucs. The best part of all was I wanted to see if the emerged Queen had killed the other cells. So I got a nuc ready and opened one of the Big cells up and my wife went crazy when this big fat tiger striped queen came crawling out. Immediatly she laid claim to that nuc. Gotta love this beekeeping!

 

[barry42001]

question, why would you want to use queens from swarm cells, better to make proper splits, and naturally requeen then use queen cells from swarmy colonies--assuming that proper space for expansion ( honey supers ) have been provided. Just think may be better to keep your work force intact rather then risk losing half or more( to after swarms ), your worker force to a swarm that flew away from your yard out of your control.

 

[Poptart]

The reason I decided to use swarm cells was to hopefully stop after swarms from happening. This hive had plenty of room a week and half ago but our flow seems to be of record proportion this year. This particular hive had already lost bees to the initial swarm which I unfortunatly missed. This means my honey production in this hive was shot in the foot. This hive was super strong before the swarm and got ahead of me! That's the reason I decided to split it up into nucs and I still left a full deep of brood, honey and pollen in the original hive.