My bees have swarmed! What next?
There is nothing more worrying in the world of bees, than opening up your colony and thinking, ‘where have all my bees gone’? In this blog I will cover the process of swarming with a particular focus on damage limitation after realising your bees have swarmed.
What is swarming?
Taken from the BBKA website:
Swarming is a natural process. It is the colony reproducing by the old queen leaving with some of the bees. They leave their hive and find somewhere to hang in a cluster until the scout bees decide on their new home. Most swarms occur on warm sunny days from May to the end of July usually between 11am – 4pm. Often there is a peak on a fine day after poor weather when temperatures approach the high teens. A real honey bee swarm can be extremely dramatic involving many thousands of bees in a large noisy cloud However, they normally settle into a cluster within 15 minutes.
How to tell if you are bees are trying to swarm?
Luckily, it’s relatively easy to see when the bees are preparing to swarm. They give you a warning sign and so long as you are doing perfectly regular seven day inspections, you should identify the signs prior to the bees swarming.
When a queen leaves the hive and takes half of the bees with her during a swarm, the colony ensures they won’t be left without a queen by preparing numerous swarm cells, prior to the existing queen departing. The existing queen bee is coerced into laying fertile eggs into queen cups, which the bees then feed copious amounts of royal jelly to turn them into new, virgin queen bees. In the case of a swarm, you can get around 5-25 swarm cells in a single hive. This is what you are looking for during your inspections.
If you find uncapped swarm cells with a queen in situ, then the colony is trying to swarm and you have caught in time to perform once the procedures below. If you find any number of capped queen cells (closed over so you cannot see the larvae inside) and no sign of the queen, then your bees have almost certainly swarmed and it’s time for damage limitation mode.
How to stop bees swarming?
The main role of the beekeeper throughout the season, is to do whatever it takes to stop your bees swarming. There are various methods, both reactive and proactive, for swarm management. In this section, I will cover the three most effective swarm management techniques:
Making up a nuc: This is by far and away the simplest method. Just before the swarm season in May-June. You remove the queen and place in a nuc with some brood and stores. You can either let the existing colony raise a new queen via the emergency impulse or add in a new mated queen. The reduction in number of bees in the hive should help them resist swarming but the beauty of this method is that you get a backup nucleus colony should anything happen to your existing colony! Take a look at this video to see how to make up a nuc HERE.
Artificial swarm: The artificial swarm is the name for a group of methods that all do pretty much the same thing; splitting the bees when you realise they are about to swarm. It’s a very effective method which leaves you with two colonies. One with the original queen (the artificial swarm) and one with half the bees and open swarm cells, ready to produce the next generation of queen.
Demaree split: I know, I am a one trick pony but I LOVE the Demaree split. It’s part of the group of artificial swarms but it’s the only one that manages the process vertically, not horizontally. This means instead of splitting a hive into two, you make the split vertically and you end up with one beehive, with two separate colonies that over the course of the next 2-3 weeks, merge back into one. Its brilliant and you should try it with one very important caveat. It doesn’t work as a reactive process and needs to be done pre-emptively, before the bees decide they are going to swarm. It’s a super simple process. You remove the entire brood box and place ABOVE the supers. You then add a new brood box at the bottom full of wax foundation. Find the queen from the top brood box and on a frame of capped brood, move her to the bottom box, swapping with a frame of foundation. 8 days later come back and remove ALL emergency queen cells from the top box. That’s it. Check out my video HERE if that made NO SENSE whatsoever.
My bees have definitely swarmed! What next?
If you go into your beehives and notice a sudden drop in number of bees, capped swarm cells, no queen and no eggs, then your bees have almost certainly swarmed. There are two options from this point onwards but I only recommend one of them:
Recommended: Remove ALL queens cells and add a mated queen. You can buy our queens HERE - https://www.blackmountainhoney.co.uk/buyqueenbees
Follow the process for introduction HERE - https://www.blackmountainhoney.co.uk/guides/how-to-requeen-a-beehive
Not recommended for beginners: Remove all but ONE queen cell and leave the colony to requeen naturally.
Do not just leave the bees to sort it out themselves. They will cast swarm away to nothing and it’s nearly impossible to recover after multiple cast swarms.
The reason I don’t recommend letting the bees requeen naturally for beginners, is that if it goes wrong, it can be very difficult to get it back on track. You will need to find and kill an unmated virgin queen, which are notoriously difficult to find. If you do this, it can lead to a colony failing over winter or even earlier to a DLQ or absconding. The much safer bet if you find capped queen cells (they must ALL be capped) is to remove them all and add a mated queen. Don’t feel disheartened if your bees swarm. It happens to all if us. Learn from it and try to avoid it happening again.
Will my bees recover after swarming?
If your bees swarm and you manage to get into the beehive in time and remove all the queen cells except one and let them successfully requeen naturally, then your bees will recover relatively quickly and she be good to go into winter with an average drop in honey production. If you the mating is unsuccessful, then you will almost certainly get zero honey in the season and risk the colony failing over winter due to a poorly mated queen.
If you let the colony continue to cast swarm (that’s the do nothing approach), they will dwindle away to a very small colony that wont recover (if at all) until the following year.
If you remove all the capped queen cells and replace with a mated queen, your colony is only set back by around 2-3 weeks. They will recover quickly and you can still get a decent honey crop in the same season. This is the method we use if any of our colonies of bees swarm.
If you are interested in our mated queen bees, our F1 Buckfast queens will make a dramatic impact on your colony at any point throughout the year. You can buy them HERE - https://www.blackmountainhoney.co.uk/buyqueenbees
