Artificial Swarming / Explained



This is not the best video to demonstrate the artificial swarming procedure, neither the best explanation but they do the essentials, remember that the bees have survived to beekeepers for thousands of years so they are very tolerant to our mistakes. The goal of artificial swarming is to prevent the old queen for swarming and at the same time to produce a new queen to augment your stock.

The colony is made up of 4 parts: Queen, Drones, Nurse Bees and Forage bees. The queen swarms with a good batch of forage bees so if you can separate them from the Queen at the highest of the swarm period you are delaying and hopefully avoiding the swarm of your queen this year. We achieve this by moving the queen to another hive in a close by location so the bees that are mature enough to fly return to the original location and the queen remains in the new location with mostly nurse bees that are not able to fly.

In case of the bees of my apiary, they feel as much attachment to the location as they feel to the box so I do both: I set a old Queen 2-3 meters aside in a different brood box.

At the original location I leave the original box with plenty of nurse bees. You ensure  that there are plenty of nurse bees by brushing the bees of some of the panels.

Since you make the brood box at the original location queensless, the nurse bees will make queen cells and the forages will guarantee a good supply of food. This is the standard procedure an is what we can see in the video.

In addition to the standard procedure, I prepare the hive before adding a second brood box a month before I plan the artificial swarming (starting in mid April - so now). By doing so I get an strong colony and I ensure the queen has plenty of space. After the four weeks or so, I set a queen excluder between so I isolate the queen in one of the brood boxes. After 6 days, the queenless brood box has all the brood cells sealed. This the time to separate the boxes as usual, the advantage of preparing the hive this way is that since you know that there is not sealed brood you ensure that the bees are going to build the queen cells from an extra frame that you add with eggs and very young larva - you can kill the larva that is too old become queen so you do your best to get the best possible queen. If you have more that enough bees you can even set a queenless nucleus and have a go.

As I said at the beginning, the bees have survived to thousands of years of  beekeeping and will survide to us.

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