Tag Archives: Pagden

And they’re off …

I posted last week on the relative lateness of the start of the beekeeping season here in Scotland ¹. Having been away for a few days I was both surprised and disconcerted to find this waiting for me when I arrived at the apiary to conduct the first inspections of the year.

When is a swarm not a swarm?

Surprised because I’d missed all the seasonal clues that indicated swarming might be imminent.

Disconcerted because, in the interests of full disclosure, I’d have to admit to it 😉

The colony behind the near-invisible one inch entrance hole through the bee shed wall is a double brood colony in an Abelo poly hive. It was headed by a 2018 queen (or had been 🙁 ) and had a nice temperament and good manners.

The queen was marked blue and one wing was clipped to prevent her flying off.

But it wouldn’t have stopped her trying to fly off. Instead she would have ignominiously spiralled to the ground ².

Usually what then happens is she attempts to climb back up and the swarm gathers around her. In a standard hive this is often this is underneath the hive stand.

My guess was that she’d made it up to the landing board and stopped or got stuck there.

I had a gentle prod about in the beard of well-tempered bees but could see no sign of her.

With about 20 more hives to inspect I quickly decided to walk them into a fresh hive … I’d let them do this while I got on with other colonies in the apiary.

Don’t think, do

Walk this way

I put together a new floor and a brood box of mostly foundationless frames. I put one or two frames of drawn comb in and gently dislodged a couple of clumps of bees into the box.

Within a very short time more bees were marching down the wall of the shed and clustering between the frames of drawn comb in the brood box.

What started as a trickle became – if not a torrent – then certainly a determined stream of bees taking up residence in the new box.

To encourage them I balanced a split board across the tops of the frames to provide a welcoming dark ‘cavity’ for them to occupy. Very soon you could see bees fanning strongly at the opening between the split board and the shed wall.

Fanning workers

I interpreted this as meaning the queen had entered the box and the workers were encouraging others to join her.

After an hour or so I moved the hive a few inches away from the shed wall, placed a crownboard and roof on and carried on inspecting other hives in the apiary. By this time about 75% of the bees had left the ‘swarm’ and entered the brood box.

Not so fast

And that’s when everything ground to a halt.

There were no bees fanning at the hive entrance. No more bees entered the box through the entrance. Instead they started leaving in dribs and drabs.

I’ve hived swarms like this before, or done the classic ‘walk them up a sheet’ having dumped them from a skep outside a hive. Other than this being a real spectacle, one of the striking features is that what starts as a mass of bees ends being an absence of bees … they all enter the hive.

‘Walking’ a swarm into a hive

Clearly something was wrong and I was beginning to suspect that there wasn’t a queen in the ‘swarm’ at all.

So I did what I should have done in the first place. I had a look in the original hive.

Hello there!

Blue skinny queen

I smoked the double brood box gently from the bottom, intending to encourage the queen (if she was there) into the upper box.

The box was busy but not packed with bees ³, there were good amounts of sealed brood (and a really nice tight laying pattern on many frames).

There were quite a few ‘play cups’ and a few had eggs in them. This is one of the early signs of swarming.

I found the queen on the 19^th of 22 frames.

Perhaps I was too gentle with the smoke 🙄

She was the queen I was expecting. Marked blue, though the paint was beginning to rub off a bit, and with the left wing clipped.

She looked like she had lost a bit of weight.

Big fat queens in full laying mode (which they should be getting to by late April) aren’t very aerodynamic so workers slim the queen down before swarming to improve her flying ability.

This queen looked to me like she’d been on the F-plan diet (but remember I’d not seen her since last August). In addition, the number of eggs in the colony was relatively low. This would also be expected if the colony had been preparing to swarm as queens reduce their laying rate in the few days before swarming.

What else could be seen?

Stores and pollen levels were good.

The notable absence from the hive was of well developed, sealed or unsealed queen cells.

A colony will normally swarm once developing queen cells are capped. A colony with a clipped queen often delays swarming for a few more days. It’s therefore usual to find sealed queen cells in a swarmed colony. There may also be unsealed cells as well.

~3 day old queen cell …

There wasn’t anything close to a sealed queen cell in the colony ⁴. The best developed were, at the very most, a couple of days old.

So what happened?

Other than the absence of well developed queen cells the colony looked as though it had swarmed.

If it walks like a duck etc.

Since the queen was clipped she had eventually clambered back to the hive and re-entered, leaving many of the workers who had left with her clustered around the hive entrance.

That’s currently my best guess ⁵.

If that was the case, notwithstanding the current lack of well-developed queen cells, they’d be trying again as soon as the weather was good enough. I therefore decided to preempt them by doing a classic artificial swarm.

I moved the queen on a frame with a small patch of brood into the box I’d used to try and ‘walk’ the swarm into. I then moved the – now queenless – double brood box a couple of metres off to one side in the shed. Finally I placed the queenright box in the place the original colony had occupied.

And what will happen?

Full details are in the description of Pagden’s artificial swarm. The flying bees from the double brood box will return to the box with the queen. The hive bees in the double brood box will start to rear one or more new queens.

And at that point I’ll intervene.

The double brood box has lots of brood and stores spread across 21 frames. The bees are well tempered, stable on the comb and have no significant signs of chalkbrood or other diseases (and Varroa and virus levels are exceptionally low – I’d measured both ⁶).

They are a good stock to make increase from.

I’ll check them in a few days and see how queen cells are developing. Once there are good sealed cells I’ll split the colony into several 3-5 frame nucleus colonies. The final number will depend upon the number of good queen cells and the number of bees left in the colony.

It should be possible to generate half a dozen good nucleus colonies from a suitable double brood colony without too much of a problem.

First inspection summary

I got through all my colonies (eventually). With a reasonable number to compare it’s easy to define the good, the bad and the indifferent ones.

It’s much easier to do this once the season is properly underway, which is a good reason not to inspect too soon in the year. Some colonies are very early-starters, others lag bit. If you inspect too early you might consider the slow ones are dud or failed queens.

I was pleased to see that most were good or at least indifferent, with only a couple clearly exhibiting undesirable personality traits – aggression, laziness, running, following – or, in one case, disease (rather too much chalkbrood). These will be destined for prompt requeening and drone brood will be removed to reduce their contribution to the gene pool.

My overwintered 5 frame nucs looked excellent, with a couple needing re-hiving immediately.

Here’s one I prepared earlier

The first inspection is really little more than a check that things are all OK. It doesn’t matter whether I see the queen. If there are eggs present I’m happy.

Eggs? Overt disease? Stores? Brood? Space? … next please!

Overwintering losses

I lost 10% of my colonies this winter – two from 20. This includes both full colonies and overwintered 5 frame nucs.

One colony drowned. The lid and crownboard blew away in a severe storm and they were subjected to a three-day deluge over a long weekend when I was away.

Mea culpa. I should have had more bricks on the roof.

Spot the drone laying queen

In the second colony the queen failed and turned into a drone laying queen (DLQ). This had been my worst-tempered colony last year and was scheduled for requeening. However, the queen I found wasn’t the clipped and marked one I’d left there in August. Clearly there had been a late-season supercedure and the replacement queen was poorly mated.

Although she was a bee I didn’t keep it is great to be beekeeping again 🙂

Colophon

And they’re off! is the phrase used by horse racing commentators at the start of a race. It is also the title of a song composed by William Finn from the musical A New Brain. The song is about the damage gambling does to families. There’s a good cover version by Philip Quast on YouTube.

Natural vs. artificial swarms

I’ve now covered four of the most frequently used swarm control strategies. These are:

Pagden’s artificial swarm – the horizontal splitting of the colony
The vertical split – an equipment-frugal variant of the above involving a vertical separation of the colony
The nucleus method – in which the queen is removed with sufficient workers to make up a small (nuc) colony, leaving the original colony to rear another queen
The Demaree method – which, at its simplest, relocates the queen from the brood and associated nurse bees, but does not physically split the colony

If conducted correctly all should prevent loss of a swarm. However, the individual methods – even the first three which involve the physical separation of the bees in the hive – are not the same.

In addition, these swarm control methods do not recapitulate the separation of bees that occurs when a hive naturally swarms.

The purpose of this post is to contrast the original and new colony composition of the split-based methods of swarm control (i.e. Pagden and vertical) with natural swarms.

Temporal polyethism

I introduced this term when discussing the honey bee colony as a superorganism. It means that adult worker bees have different roles depending upon their age. For the first two and a bit weeks they have duties inside the hive such as cell cleaning, brood rearing and wax production.

They then transition through a period of being guard bees before becoming foragers, flying from the hive and collecting water, nectar and pollen.

For convenience I’ll refer to these two groups of bees as young, nurse or hive bees and flying bees.

Vertical and horizontal splits

The classic Pagden artificial swarm and the vertical split are fundamentally the same process.

If unsealed queen cells are found during a colony inspection the queen, with a frame of emerging brood, is moved to a new box. This box is placed on the site of the original hive.

The remaining bees and brood are moved, either to one side in the case of the Pagden or on top of the queen-containing box (separated by a split board) in a vertical split.

Split board …

Critically, the new box with the brood and bees is provided with a new hive entrance, located off to one side or on the opposite side of the original hive ¹.

Flying home

Over the following day or two the flying bees leave the relocated brood box with the new entrance and return to the queen-containing brood box in the original location.

As a consequence of their excellent homing navigational skill, the hive manipulation results in the separation of the bees into two populations:

The flying bees i.e. those over ~3 weeks of age that had orientated to the original hive location, which are now located with the queen.
The nurse bees i.e. those less than 3 weeks old, which remain in the relocated brood box, together with the brood in all stages (eggs, larvae and pupae).

Artificial swarm separation of the colony

How does the artificial swarm compare with the age distribution of bees in a real swarm?

Real swarms

I’ve previously discussed prime swarms and casts. The former contain a mated queen. In contrast, casts are produced from very strong colonies after the prime swarm has left. Casts are headed by a virgin queen. These are sometimes called after swarms and are usually smaller than prime swarms.

What about the workers in the swarm? What might be expected?

Perhaps they’re primarily the older flying bees? After all, these are the bees that have finished their hive duties and are now routinely foraging outside the hive. It’s the natural place for them.

Swarm of bees

Alternatively, remember that swarms have no ‘homing’ instinct for a day or two after emerging. They can be readily moved and you can safely ignore the “less than three feet or more than three miles“ rule. Perhaps this means that they’re primarily young bees that have yet to go on their orientation flights?

Real experiments and contradictory results

Enough speculation … how do you determine this experimentally?

There have been numerous studies of the age distribution of bees in natural swarms. However, the data tends to be rather contradictory though the methods used are often broadly similar.

How do you determine the age composition of workers in a swarm?

Essentially you ‘spike’ the colony with a set number of marked bees of a known age over about 8 weeks. This is easy to do, but tedious.

Workers are allowed to emerge in an incubator. On the day of emergence (0 days old) they are marked with a colour that distinguishes them from older or younger bees. Every three days 100 identically marked i.e. same age, bees are added to the study hive(s). Over the period May to July this will accumulate red, then yellow, then blue, then mauve, then cyan, then pink etc. cohorts of workers, each representing a known age class.

It must be a nightmare spotting the queen in these hives 😉

The colony is allowed to swarm, the swarm collected and the number of bees of the different age cohorts in the swarm counted.

I missed a step out there. Have you ever tried counting the bees in a swarm? It’s much easier if they don’t move.

1002, 1003, 1004, 1005, er, where was I? Damn!

Perhaps it’s best that I missed that step out 🙁

What you end up with is a count of the total number of bees in the swarm and the numbers of bees of each 3 day cohort over the last several weeks. You can therefore determine the age distribution of the workers in the swarm.

Is it as simple as that?

I’ve actually oversimplified things a bit. There’s a possibility that different age cohorts of bees die within the hive at different rates, perhaps depending upon forage availability or weather or something else.

Think about it. Assume there was a dearth of nectar in late May and the blue and red labelled cohorts added during that period were underfed and died prematurely.

If there were very low numbers of blue and red bees in the swarm you might assume that these ages were ‘left behind’ by the swarm … when actually they weren’t able to swarm at all.

The real question is therefore whether the age distribution of bees in the swarm is similar to that in the parental hive.

OK, OK … is it?

No.

Swarms do contain bees of all ages.

However there are significantly more young bees and many fewer old bees than would be expected from the age distribution of workers in the parental colony.

Age distribution of bees in swarms

The o and e in the graph above represents the position of the observed and expected median age class for the expected distributions. So, in swarm C the observed median age is ~10 days old, whereas the originating hive median age was ~19 days.

The graph above comes from a 1998 study by David Gilley ² and supports earlier work ³ by Colin Butler ⁴ which is often cited as one of the definitive studies on the ages of bees in a swarm.

Additional considerations

Is it surprising that young bees predominate in natural swarms?

Swarms usually emerge from the hive late morning or early afternoon on warm, sunny days. In fact, at exactly the time most older bees aren’t in the hive anyway because they’re out and about foraging.

Remember also that swarming is a precarious activity for the colony. Most swarms do not survive ⁵. Natural selection will have resulted in swarm populations that maximise their chance of survival.

Once bees start foraging their life expectancy is pretty short. It has been estimated that they experience about 10% mortality per day. If only old bees left in the swarm with the queen the newly established colony would very rapidly dwindle in size, perhaps before significant numbers of new brood emerged (which takes 21 days from the first egg being laid). This would likely limit the chances of survival of the new colony.

What has this got to do with artificial swarms?

As beekeepers (or at least as responsible beekeepers) we spend May and June rushing about like headless chickens trying to control swarming in our bees.

Many of us achieve this using a variety of methods which are generically referred to as artificial swarms. I suspect that many beekeepers think that the artificiality is because of our interventions.

Where have all my young girls gone?

It is … but it’s worth remembering that the artificial swarms we generate are very different in composition to natural swarms. Our artificial swarms predominantly leave the older bees associating with the queen, with the young bees remaining with the brood.

These old bees have to draw new comb and rear the new brood. These are activities they last did weeks ago (a long time in the life of a bee).

Final thoughts

There are artificial swarm control methods that were developed to better replicate the age distribution of bees in a natural swarm. One example of these is use of a Taranov board. I’ll cover this in a future post.

It’s also worth noting that the bees of different ages in a natural swarm have different roles even before they occupy a new location. The older bees form a mantle around the bivouacked swarm that protects it from inclement weather (amongst other things) and the oldest bees are the scouts responsible for finding a new nest site.

Again, both topics for another post … I’ve got bait hives to set out 🙂

The nucleus method

Almost all beekeeping associations – and most books – teach Pagdens’ artificial swarm as the recommended method of swarm control. It is tried and tested and reasonably dependable. However it can be a bit tricky to grasp for inexperienced beekeepers.

At least part of the problem is you have two hives that look the same, one on the original site, one adjacent. Conducted properly, the adjacent hive is moved to the other side of the original a week or so into the process.

Teaching this in a poorly lit, draughty church hall in late January, facing the audience with the inevitable confusion over left and right, and getting ‘new’ and ‘old’ hives mixed up, often bamboozles the beginner ¹. Or the instructor 😉

Here’s an alternative … the nucleus method of swarm control.

There she goes …

General principles

This method is simplicity itself. When the colony looks as though it’s preparing to swarm you remove the queen, some stores and some bees into a nucleus hive.

This keeps the queen safe in case things go awry with the original colony.

You then return a week later and remove all but one queen cell in the original colony. The virgin queen emerges, mates, returns and starts laying.

A month or so after starting the original colony is headed by a new queen and you have a ‘spare’ building up in the nucleus box. You can overwinter this, sell it, give it away or – after removing the queen – unite it back with the original hive.

And that’s it … I said it was simple 🙂

Here is a more complete account.

Equipment needed

It goes without saying that the nucleus method of swarm control needs a nucleus (nuc) hive ². Any sort of 5 frame nuc is suitable. Nucs are incredibly useful, so they are a good investment. If you’re buying one for the first time get polystyrene as they’re lighter, better insulated and much better for overwintering bees in. I’ve reviewed poly nucs a few years ago. There are even more makes to choose from now.

I’d recommend not using a two frame nuc as there’s not really enough room for stores and colony expansion ³.

Two frame nuc box … a bit too small for the nucleus method of swarm control (but usable at a pinch)

In addition to the nuc you’ll need five frames that are compatible with your nuc and hive. Ideally, one or two of these should be drawn comb, but don’t worry if you just have foundation. A dummy board can also be useful. Like nucs, you can almost never have too many dummy boards.

Honey bee development

To properly understand honey bee swarm control you really need to understand the timing of the development cycle of queen bees.

Honey bee development

Queen cells have a characteristic appearance. Unlike the horizontally-oriented worker cells, larvae destined to become queens hatch from eggs laid in vertically-oriented queen cells. After three days as eggs and a further five days of larval development the queen cell is sealed.

A colony will usually swarm on or soon after ⁴ the queen cells are sealed.

~3 day old queen cell …

This is why it is recommended that colony inspections are conducted at seven day intervals. If the colony is thinking of swarming you’ll find an unsealed cell (because there were none last week when you inspected and they take 8 days to be sealed) and you can immediately start swarm control.

Day 1 – Making up the queenright nucleus colony

If you find one or more unsealed queen cells at a routine inspection … don’t panic. You’re prepared, you’ve done your homework and you have the necessary equipment.

Stuff the entrance of a nucleus hive with grass and place it near the colony ⁵.
Remove one of the outer frames from the colony (you’ve probably already done this to give yourself room for the inspection) as this should have a good amounts of sealed and unsealed stores.
Check again that the queen isn’t on this frame of stores (unlikely) and that it doesn’t contain any queen cells (again unlikely).
Gently transfer the frame of stores plus all the adhering bees to the nucleus box.
Continue the inspection and find the queen. Be gentle, don’t rush, don’t use too much smoke.
Ideally you want the queen on a frame with some sealed and emerging brood. If you are lucky you’ll find her on a suitable frame.
Gently transfer the queen and the frame she is on to the nucleus box. It is very important that this frame has no queen cells on it. Check very carefully. Destroy any you find.
Your nuc colony is now queenright and has two frames of bees. Push the frames against the side wall of the nuc box, leaving a wide gap.
Into this gap shake a further two frames of bees. Foragers are likely to leave the nuc and return to the original hive. You do not want the box to be short of young bees. If in doubt shake a further frame of bees into the gap in the nuc ⁶.
Add a frame of drawn comb if you have it then fill the box with foundation. Add a dummy board if needed. Gently place the crownboard and roof on the nuc, secure everything with a strap and turn your attention to the colony.

Notes

The purpose of this exercise is to establish a small colony with stores, a laying queen, space to lay and sufficient bees to support her and the brood being reared. Remember stores, queen, bees, space and no queen cells you won’t go wrong.
You will usually find the queen on a frame with eggs and young larvae. It’s very important that this frame does not have any queen cells on it.
Ideally you want the queen on a frame of emerging brood. This offers a number of advantages
- The young bees will immediately strengthen the population supporting the queen
- The vacated cells can be used by the queen to lay eggs (so reducing the need for drawn comb, or for the bees to build new comb)
- The nuc colony will go through a period with no sealed brood and you can take advantage of this for Varroa management if needed (I’ll deal with this in another post)
- It’s unlikely (due to the age of the other brood) to have a queen cell on it
One of the most common problems encountered with this method of swarm control is making up (or ending up) with a nuc that is not strong enough. A weak nuc will be unable to defend itself against robbing or wasps. There’s very little chance of weakening the original hive too much.
One way to avoid losing foragers from the nuc is to move it to an out apiary more than 3 miles from the original hive.
If you do leave the nuc in the same apiary check it a couple of days later. The bees should have chewed their way out through the dried grass. If they haven’t, pull a bit out at the corner of the entrance to encourage them to fly.

Day 1 – Preparing with the queenless colony

Inspect every frame in the colony. Destroy all large queen cells ⁷. Anything that looks like the queen cell in the picture above should be destroyed. The idea here is to only leave queen cells containing very small larvae.
Mark the frames containing these remaining selected queen cells using a drawing pin or pen.
Push the frames together, add two frames of foundation, add the crownboard and close up the colony.

Here’s one I prepared earlier

One week later – Ensuring the queenless colony does not swarm

The timing and thoroughness of this inspection is important. Don’t do it earlier. Or later. Don’t rush it and don’t leave more than one queen cell.

Inspect the colony and look for queen cells on the frames you marked a week earlier. These had very young larvae in them then and so will now be sealed ⁸.
Select one queen cell to keep. Just one. Which one? Choose one that is large, well-shaped and has a sculptured exterior.
Destroy all the other queen cells on this frame. All of them! If you need to remove the bees to see the frame better either brush them off gently or blow gently on them. Do not shake the bees off the frame as this might damage the developing queen.
Gently return the frame with the selected queen cell to the box.
Inspect all other frames in the colony (not just the ones you marked last week) and destroy all of the queen cells you find.
You can shake the bees off these other frames to be sure of finding all other queen cells.
Remember that some queen cells will be unsealed ⁹ … destroy them all.
Return all the frames to the colony. Close it up and leave it for at least two weeks before inspecting again (see below).

Sealed queen cell …

Notes

The purpose of this return visit is to leave the colony with only a single queen cell.
Because you removed the queen a week ago there are no other suitably aged young larvae or eggs for the colony to rear queens from. Therefore, the colony cannot produce multiple casts (swarms headed by virgin queens).
The nucleus method of swarm control often leaves the queenless colony very strong ¹⁰, if you leave more than one queen cell the colony may produce casts.
What if the queen gets lost on a mating flight? Shouldn’t I leave two queen cells? Just to be on the safe side? No. If there’s a problem with the queen getting mated you’ve still got the old queen tucked away safely in the nuc box.
Queen cells that are large, well shaped and sculptured have received a lot of attention from the workers and so presumably contain a well-fed and good quality queen ¹¹.
Don’t be tempted to inspect the colony in less than two weeks. Ideally leave them for three weeks. If you inspect too early there’s a chance that the queen may not have had a chance to mate and start laying (so the point of inspecting is missed) or – worse – that she returns from her mating flight as you have the box open and is then confused or lost.
Don’t meddle! Look for pollen being taken into the colony.
Have patience. Bees have been around for a few million years. They would not be this successful if they weren’t pretty good at getting queens mated …
Finally, particularly if the weather is poor, check the nuc as well. Ensure that it has sufficient stores. With reduced numbers of bees there’s a chance they could starve if the bees cannot forage (in which case the queen in the main colony is going to struggle to get out and mate as well).

Everynuc …

Pros and cons of the nucleus method of swarm control

With the exception of vertical splits almost all of my swarm control uses this nucleus method ¹². I particularly like the nucleus method because I have lots of nuc boxes ( 🙂 ) and because it leaves manageable single-entrance hives rather than double height, multiple entrance stacks.

Almost all of the foraging bees are left with the original colony so the nectar-gathering capacity is not significantly reduced.

I almost never use the Pagden artificial swarm, largely because it ties up too much equipment.

Pros

Limited amount of extra equipment needed – five frames and a nuc box … both of which are useful anyway.
The old queen is kept safe and out of the way.
Simple to implement, with just two visits at fixed times.
Reasonably easy to understand the manipulations involved.
No heavy lifting.
You generate a nucleus colony to give away or to build up for overwintering.

Cons

You need to find the queen.
You need to find all the queen cells and use your judgement as to their age and quality.
Unless you remove the nuc to an out apiary there’s a good chance lots of the bees will return to the original hive. Make sure you add enough at the start and be prepared to add more if you check the nuc after a day or two and find it heavily depleted.
If you don’t want to make increase the nuc is a little more difficult to unite back with the original colony ¹³.

Give it a go … what could possibly go wrong?

Pagdens’ artificial swarm

Every beekeeping association that runs a winter course for beginners will teach swarm control. In almost every case they use the artificial swarm method that evolved from that promoted by James Pagden (1814-1878). So universal is this teaching that the terms ‘Pagden’ and ‘artificial swarm’ are used almost interchangeably.

Swarm control – defined below – is an important skill in beekeeping. It saves your bees from bothering the neighbours and by not losing swarms you increase your honey crop. Furthermore, understanding the principles may help apply some related queen rearing techniques.

I’m planning a few posts on swarm control this season and realised I’d never described the ‘classic’ artificial swarm – possibly because I don’t often use it^∇. To avoid referencing other sites with more or less comprehensive (or correct) descriptions I’ve catalogued the ‘bare bones’ of the process here.

Swarm control

A small swarm …

Swarm control and prevention are two different things. The latter are the steps taken to stop a colony from ‘thinking’ about swarming, e.g. young queens and ample space. In contrast, swarm control are what is needed once there are signs that swarming by the colony is imminent. The most common sign is the discovery of unsealed, charged (i.e. occupied) queen cells during an inspection. You practise swarm prevention to prevent, or at least delay, the need for swarm control. Once swarm control is needed many beekeepers use Pagdens’ artificial swarm.

If you discover sealed queen cells during an inspection there’s a good chance your swarm prevention didn’t work and that it’s too late for swarm control. Colonies with unclipped queens usually swarm when the developing queen cells are capped. If there are sealed queen cells and no sign of the queen or eggs then they’re probably hanging in a tree or occupying a bait hive by now.

The artificial swarm

Pagdens’ artificial swarm …

The principle of the artificial swarm is to separate the queen and flying bees from the brood and nurse bees. This is achieved by a couple of simple colony manipulations. These exploit the tendency of flying bees to return to the location of the hive they were reared in, or more accurately, the location of the hive from which they took their orientation flights. If you remember this it all makes sense.

The diagram is colour coded. The original hive location is the centreline of the image. The old hive is mid-grey, the new hive is light-grey. Brood-containing frames are red, foundation or drawn comb is black. The queen is indicated Q (black if mated, white if a virgin or recently mated). The timings of the manipulations are indicated.

Day 0 and Day 1

Don’t panic …

During a routine inspection of a strong colony anytime from mid-April to late June (depending upon the season) you discover unsealed, charged queen cells. Don’t panic^‡. Collect the necessary equipment for an artificial swarm – a complete new hive consisting of a floor, brood box and full complement of frames (preferably some or all are drawn comb, the rest can be just foundation – or foundationless frames), a crownboard and a roof. An additional hive stand is also useful, though not essential.

In the diagram I’ve assumed that it takes a day to collect this lot and get back to the apiary^† … whatever, once you’re ready, proceed as follows.

Move the old hive a couple of metres away from the original location. If there are supers present remove these and the queen excluder first, putting them aside.
Place the new floor and filled brood box on the original site, with the entrance facing the same way as before.
Remove two frames from the centre of the new brood box.
Gently go through the old hive. Find a frame of open brood. Shake the frame gently to dislodge the flying bees, inspect it carefully, place the queen onto the frame and put it into the centre of the new brood box. There must be no queen cells on this frame. Push together the adjacent frames and add a spare frame so the hive is full.
If there were supers present at the start place them on the new hive above the queen excluder. If there were no supers you might need to feed this colony some thin syrup to encourage them to draw new comb.
Add the crownboard and roof to the new hive.
Push together the frames in the old hive, add one more frame, put the crownboard and roof back and leave them to get on with things.

What does this first manipulation achieve?

At the end of this first manipulation you’ve manually separated the queen from almost all the brood and nurse bees. The queen is in the original location in the new hive. All the flying bees will return to the original location – because that’s where they first orientated to – over the next day or so. This new hive is viable as it contains a mated queen, bees to support her and lots of empty space for her to lay in.

The old hive is also viable, but only of they first rear a new queen. Since there are open queen cells present these must be sealed to allow pupation and metamorphosis which takes 7 days.

Day 7

Move the old hive to the opposite side of the new hive. A couple of metres away is fine. Flying bees that have matured in the old hive during the preceding week will find the hive missing when they return from foraging. They’ll most likely enter the hive closest to the hive they flew from, which is the one with the queen in it i.e. the new hive on the original hive stand. This boosts the strength of the queenright colony. More importantly, it depletes the old hive of bees, making it less likely that they’ll throw off a cast if more than one virgin emerges^§.

It’s important that the old hive is not interfered with after the first 7 days. There will be a new virgin queen present who will be going out on mating flights a few days after emergence. Leave this hive untouched for at least another fortnight. In the diagram above the black frame in the old hive indicates that the oldest brood is emerging, leaving plenty of young bees to tend to the newly mated queen and ample space for her to lay in due course.

Day 21+

The old hive should now contain a newly mated and laying queen. Inspections of this colony can start again. The new colony – on the original site – should be building up well.

If you want to increase your colony numbers (make increase), you’ve done so. If you don’t want to make increase then the two colonies can be united over newspaper. Remove the old queen first, either terminally (!) or by giving her to another beekeeper.

^∇ I tend to prefer a vertical split for two reasons – it uses less equipment and it takes up less space. However, the underlying principles of the two processes are very similar as will be discussed in a future post.

^† Day 0 and Day 1 can be done on the same day. I’ve separated them on the assumption that you’re as badly prepared as I am and don’t have piles of spare equipment waiting to be used in the apiary. The only thing to be sure of is not to let the queen cells be capped. If necessary knock back all the visible queen cells … once they’ve decided to swarm they will start more.

^‡ I can never write those words without hearing them uttered in the voice of Lance Corporal Jones from the sitcom Dad’s Army. Since this was broadcast between 1968 and 1977 writing that last sentence makes me feel rather old.

^§ I’m trying to steer well clear of the thorny problem of how many queen cells to leave in the old hive. That’s a separate topic in its own right. Some suggest letting the bees decide (i.e. do nothing), others leave one or two.