New Swarm Put into Warre Hive

Today was a good day.

I manage bees for a local company, who own a biodynamic farm over the road from me. The bees are managed without opening the hives, which means that I check them every day during the swarming season, in order to try and take any swarms after they emerge from the hive.We also have bait hives out. They show when a swarm is looking for a new home, and can be occupied by a swarm. I had two swarms fly into bait hives last year.

A couple of days ago I warned them that I thought that the hives were close to swarming, and that we should check them twice a day for the next few days. My reasons were simple. Both hives were very busy, had lots of drones flying, we had kept them to two national brood boxes to restrict the space in the hive, and the cold snap was likely to have held them back from swarming, with the weather due to improve over the weekend, it just seemed likely. Not concrete proof, but a bit of educated intuition.

I took my young apprentice, who is also, technically the boss, and not that young, to show him what he needed to look for, and there was a prime swarm, spread over the trunk of a large Alder tree, about 20 meters from the hives. My street cred went up a couple of notches there and then.

It is easier if they are hanging from a branch, as you can shake them into a box, or cut it off. Initially, we tried to get them to walk up into a box, but they were not very obliging, so in the end, I just scooped them off of the tree, and into the box. We inverted the box, sat it on a stand that we had covered with a sheet. The queen must have been inside, as within half an hour, all of the stragglers had flown into the box.

The new Warre hives were already set up about 400 meters away, so we took the bees across, set up a ramp, spread the sheet over it, to stop the bees from getting under the ramp, and shook them onto it. Paul was fascinated, watching the first bees to go in, fanning pheromones to call the rest in, and then the whole swarm started to march up the ramp, and go inside. I didn’t have time to take pictures, but he managed a couple of video clips of them going into the hive. If I can get hold of the clip, I’ll post it on the site.

These are not the first bees to go into a Warre hive in Lincolnshire. Nick Vowles, from Marshland PIGS, put a swarm into a Warre last year. there may be more, that I don’t know about.

We have to put some more bars in the lower boxes. The hives were out as bait hives, and the bars were left out so that scout bees could assess the size of  the hive more easily. There are observation windows in two of the boxes so I’ll get to see how well they are doing.

Conventional beekeeping would have delayed the swarming, by destroying queen cells, at eight day intervals, until it became obvious that the bees had made up their mind to swarm. Then, having kept them from swarming at the time when the bees had assessed was the best time for them, the beekeeper would split the hive. We do not know how the bees choose who goes with the swarm, and who stays behind, and we certainly cannot do it better than them. All of this to done take more honey. With a nucleus costing around £140, you have to work pretty hard to get enough honey to make £140 PROFIT, we’re short of colonies, and yet most beekeepers are spending lots of energy preventing swarming. It doesn’t make sense to me. I’m lucky that I can be around pretty much every day, to watch the bees, and I guess that not everybody has that opportunity.

Take Care

Deano