As the daylight hours become shorter in the late autumn, the bees consolidate the brood chamber. The queen lays fewer eggs and the brood is confined to the middle frames. The remaining frames are filled with honey for winter survival.
The queen starts laying again from about mid august onwards and as the new bees hatch out in the next month or so, the hive population increases. In suburban conditions the bees are often able to collect nectar during winter and don’t use up much of the stored honey in the brood nest. If honey has not been extracted in late summer and the super on top of the brood box is also full of honey, the hive can be thought of as ‘honey bound’.
This is the classic scenario for swarming.
So what does the backyard beekeeper do about this?
On a warm mid to late September day the outside honey frames in the brood box are raised above the excluder and replaced by a mix of frames of newly drawn out worker cells and frames of foundation. If there is room in the super the honey frames from below should be placed above the excluder so that there are sufficient stores to ensure that bees don’t starve if there is a sustained cold snap in a classic case of the ‘spring dwindle’.
Giving the queen more room to lay is the result and giving the bees work to do by drawing out foundation gives you a better chance of avoiding a loss of at least half of your worker bees.
Comments
6 responses to “Preventing swarming”
Hi Alf, good tips to preserve our precious workers. And how important it is to maintain the highest number of workers coming into summer. The one additional thing I do to minimize swarming is to keep the queen excluder at home in the back of he garage.
This gives the queen free rein ( no pun intended ) to maximize the free space in the second or third boxes to lay and allows the numbers to build as quick as possible. Takes a bit more time keeping an eye on the buildup, but this approach has given us hives of 5-7 boxes full of bees on quite a few occasions.
And only running 12-15 hives, I can afford the time to gently work thru the supers when taking honey, and move any brood high up down to the second box. I know this becomes unworkable when running many hives, but a bit extra time on my part gives my bees the freedom of not having to squeeze through the excluder.
Interested in your thoughts on the excluder too. Is often a point of debate between beekeepers. Looking forward to more posts.
In their natural state in the wild, bees usually build their comb in tree trunks. These spaces are roughly cylindrical and the queen lays her eggs upwards and in the middle of the combs. This supports the idea of not having a queen excluder because the queen can lay up through the supers and probably produce a larger population of bees than in a single brood chamber with an excluder.
Most urban beekeepers with a single hive in the backyard usually have a double, meaning they have a single super above the brood chamber. In this situation with only a single box for honey, it is more practical to use an excluder and not have to deal with brood amongst the honey.
Beekeepers with larger hives and time and experience will probably get more honey without an excluder but have more work to do to get it.
What is the best way to provent my bees from swarming this spring. I have two brood boxes.
Hi Joe, the best way of avoiding swarming next spring involves avoiding congestion in the hive by giving the queen lots of room to lay eggs and if you wish to you can replace the existing queen with a new young queen. Colonies rarely swarm when there is a new queen, so if you replace the queen in late September or early October {Australian late winter / early spring} and give her plenty of room, it is unlikely that the colony will swarm.
If you are happy with the queen you have now and do not wish to replace her, you must make sure that you give the bees work to do under the excluder by adding a couple of frames of foundation and if there are lots of frames covered in brood, shake off the bees and let the brood hatch out above the excluder.
Hi Alf,
We inspected our single hive a couple of days ago. No work had been done in the two supers. The bees had only just begun to draw out some foundation (a couple of square inches). In the brood chamber there were lots of bees and a fair amount of brood and nectar. There was no capped honey visible. Only about one and a half frames were not overly covered with brood or storing nectar (outer most frame … north side). In preparation for winter we removed the two supers .. Our question is: Did we do the right thing closing down the working space?
You did the right thing John, the bees will find it easier to keep warm in winter now. It is a concern that there isnt any capped honey in the brood chamber, perhaps they will need feeding this winter.