Honey Bee Suite » swarming

Demaree demystified

Rusty — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 17:21:31 +0000

The Demaree method of swarm control was first published in the late 1800s and has evolved since. When using the Demaree method, the beekeeper separates the queen from most of the brood by manipulating the frames and a using a queen excluder. The result is a hive with little congestion and lots of room for the queen to lay. In essence, the hive “believes” it has already swarmed.

Here are the basic steps:

Remove the hive from the hive stand, leaving only the screened bottom board and slatted rack (if you are using one).
Above that, place a brood box filled with empty drawn comb.
Remove the center two frames of drawn comb and set aside.
Go back to the active brood boxes and find the queen.
Place the queen and two frames of sealed brood in the center of the new brood box.
Place a queen excluder above this box.
Above the queen excluder, place one or more empty honey supers and then the original brood box where you found the queen. Push the brood nest together in the center and put the two empty drawn frames (from step 3) on either end of the box.
Add your inner cover and telescoping lid.
After one week, go through the top brood box and remove any swarm cells.
If necessary, the entire procedure may be repeated after 9 or 10 days.

Lid

Inner cover

Brood box with sealed and unsealed brood

Honey super

Queen excluder

Brood box with drawn frames, 2 frames sealed brood, and queen

Hive stand with bottom board and slatted rack

Now that you have the hive set up, this is what happens:

The nurse bees stay with the brood and care for it.

The field force continues to forage for honey and pollen.

The queen continues to lay eggs and has lots of places to do so.

This situation is much like a hive that has already swarmed. The major difference is that both parts are in the same box. However,

As soon as the queen scent decreases in the top box, the bees will try to raise a queen from young larvae.

You may destroy these cells or remove them to a nuc.

After the brood hatches, the brood cells will be backfilled with honey.

In the end, the hive will not have swarmed, so it will contain lots of bees and lots of honey.

The growing hive may once again develop the urge to swarm, which is why a second Demaree is often needed.

The Demaree method can be quite effective at swarm control, but as you can see, it is quite labor intensive. It involves a lot of manipulation, good opportunities to lose or damage your queen, and a lot of heavy lifting. On the other hand, not only can you prevent swarming, but you can obtain some queen cells in the process.

One more important point: When you set up the Demaree hive, be sure to remove any swarm cells that are already present. Any cell not removed may hatch and cause a problem within the hive.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

How to open the brood nest

Rusty — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:32:55 +0000

Now that I covered checkerboarding as a swarm control strategy, I want to at least mention a practice called “opening the brood nest.” This is a technique where empty frames are placed between frames of brood. Many people confuse checkerboarding with opening the brood nest. The important distinction is that checkerboarding is done above the brood nest and does not disturb it. On the other hand, “opening the brood nest”—sometimes called “spreading the brood”—disrupts the integrity of the nest.

Here are the basic steps:

At the first sign of new white wax on or near the top bars you can begin.
Remove one of the frames near the middle of the brood nest. It should fill with festooning bees within about five minutes. If it doesn’t, it’s too soon to open the nest because there aren’t enough bees to repair it.
Assuming the empty space fills with festooning bees, return the frame to the same position.
Take an outside frame (one with no brood) out of the box, and push the remaining frames to the side, leaving the empty slot near the middle of the brood nest.
Put a new foundationless frame in the empty slot. The bees will now direct their energy to building new comb and filling in the brood nest rather than swarming.

Other considerations:

Depending on the strength of the hive, one or maybe two foundationless frames can be added to the brood box. Each empty frame must have filled brood comb on either side of it.

If there is already brood on all the frames, the frames of brood you remove may be centered in a second brood box directly above the first.

To be successful, you may have to re-open the nest and add frames every week or so throughout swarm season. Far from being a one-time manipulation, it requires constant monitoring.

Timing is everything with this technique. It must be done before the swarm impulse begins or it is completely ineffective. On the other hand, if you do it too soon you can chill the brood. When the nest is split up—and it will be for a period of time—it takes more bees to keep the brood warm. An unexpected cold night soon after spreading the nest could devastate the colony.

Just for the record, I do not like opening the brood nest for swarm control. I believe strongly that the integrity of the nest should be maintained. As I stated earlier, swarm control measures work by weakening the hive in some way. By changing the architecture of the nest, you are interfering with the bees’ judgment about what is best for the colony—and you are doing it repeatedly. So if you decide to try it, do so with caution: read colony strength carefully and pay close attention to the weather.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Pull out a frame of brood to test for festooning. Flickr photo by Justin Leonard.

Swarm sense

Rusty — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 19:44:21 +0000

The conversation begins like this, “I’m a new beekeeper with a quick question. How do I keep my bees from swarming?” Then, even before the paroxysms of laughter, snorting, and choking die down, an officious, self-important beekeeper proclaims, “My bees don’t swarm because I keep them content and happy.” Wow, where do I begin?

I want to say, “Look around! What do you see besides seven billion humans?” Cats, rats, and mice tuck behind every garbage pail. Ants spill from your foundation. Termites dine on your sill plates. Mites suck bee blood. Bacteria vie for space in your gut and Occupy your kitchen sink. Weeds rend cracks in your driveway and ravage your garden. Reproduction happens, babe. Every living thing has the drive to reproduce itself. Why should bees be any different?

“How do I keep my bees from swarming?” is like asking, “How do I keep my [pick one: dog, cat, guppy, kid] from reproducing?” There are ways, of course, but the ways involve interference with a natural process. You can neuter your dog or cat. You can feed pills to your daughter or supply your son with condoms. You can tear apart your brood nest, split your hive, or cut swarm cells. Even checkerboarding interferes with the colony’s perception of its own strength.

Am I saying you shouldn’t do those things? Not at all. I’m saying that you will have a better chance of succeeding if you understand the reproductive imperative. Remember, when you try to prevent a swarm, you try to stop what a colony has an irrepressible urge to do. Swarmy bees are acting according to specs, working as designed. No manufacturer recall is needed.

That said, as beekeepers we want to prevent swarms. We want our bees to work for us, we want large strong colonies, we want to curb home invasions and spare children and old folks from marauding insects. So we try to prevent what nature is hell-bent on doing. It’s a little like building levees along the Mississippi or tsunami walls in Japan—it all works to a point.

The guy who says his bees don’t swarm because they are happy is naïve . . . and usually condescending. His words imply that your bees are unhappy and you are a bad beekeeper. BS. If all bees were as happy as his bees, the species would quickly go extinct.

I don’t believe bees experience happiness or lack thereof, but let’s use that language for a moment. Do you believe an animal is happier if it is neutered? Most pet owners swear their neutered pets are “happy and content.” Most humans want the same thing, yet they don’t get neutered in the pursuit of happiness. And a simple vasectomy or tubal ligation doesn’t prevent the reproductive urge any more than clipping a wing.

But reasonable management is not a bad thing, even if we wouldn’t go there ourselves. As humans, we can manage our animals and have compassion at the same time. My own pets are spoiled beyond measure and, yes, they are neutered and I am not. My point is simply that to be a successful beekeeper, you need to look at your colony through the eyes of a biologist, not a family therapist. Lose the idea that you must make your bees “happy” to keep them from swarming.

To prevent swarming you must interfere with the course of nature. Most swarm prevention measures weaken the colony in some way, lessening its bee-ness just as neutering your dog lessens his dog-ness. That’s okay as long as you realize that preventing reproduction enhances your goals—not the goals of bees or dogs or guppies—and not the goals of nature.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Swarm in a tree. Flickr photo by Frederick Knapp.

How to checkerboard a hive

Rusty — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 21:47:36 +0000

Before I explain how to do it, I want to repeat that checkerboarding is done above the brood nest. You do not disturb the brood nest in the process. Checkerboarding is often confused with opening the brood nest, pyramiding, or unlimited brood nest management—all of which are different, and all of which I will describe later.

The following applies only to checkerboarding:

When:

Checkerboarding is done in the early spring before the bees begin swarm preparations. Since there is no disturbance to the brood nest, many beekeepers like to do it as early as possible. In any case, it needs to be completed before the expanding brood nest starts to contract due to backfilling.

Where:

Checkerboarding is done in the two supers that are directly above the brood nest. The boxes may be of any size—but they should be the same size.

What:

Alternate frames of honey are removed from one box and replaced with frames of drawn empty comb. For example, in your first super you may remove frames 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 (which are all full of honey) and replace them with frames of empty drawn comb. When you’re done, the even-numbered slots have honey, and the odd-numbered slots are empty.

You take the frames of honey you just took out of the first super and put them in the second super in the same position they had before, that is, in position 1, 3, 5, 7, And 9. This time, the even-numbered spots have frames of empty drawn comb, and the odd-numbered slots are full of honey. When stacked atop one another, the boxes look like this from the side:

Full	Empty	Full	Empty	Full	Empty	Full	Empty	Full	Empty
Empty	Full	Empty	Full	Empty	Full	Empty	Full	Empty	Full

Why:

Checkerboarding breaks up the solid band of honey that rings the top of the brood nest. This band of honey signals the bees that winter preparations are complete and it’s time to swarm. When the band is interrupted, more storage areas are exposed, and the bees defer swarming until the empty spaces are filled. Eventually, optimal swarming conditions pass and the colony may not swarm at all (see Checkerboarding).

How:

In my opinion, checkerboarding is easiest when you overwinter in three brood boxes. By early spring, the brood nest is usually in the middle box, with a box full of honey above and an empty box below. You can just put the brood box on the bottom and use the other two boxes to checkerboard. Your extracting supers can go above the checkerboarded boxes.

You can also checkerboard without three brood boxes, as long as you have a box of honey and a box of drawn comb to use for setting up the checkerboard.

Variations:

The original checkerboarding model used only empty drawn frames between the frames of honey—and the purists still do. Many beekeepers, however, have had good results using frames of undrawn foundation or even foundationless frames.

If a colony does not span the entire box, you can just checkerboard the middle frames, say 3 through 8, and leave the end frames alone.

Results:

Done properly and at the right time, checkerboarding will

Prevent swarming
Increase hive population
Produce a larger crop of honey
Eliminate the need for invasive swarm-control manipulations
Prepare the hive for winter without supplementary feed

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Checkerboarding: the X-files of beekeeping

Rusty — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:06:58 +0000

A discussion of checkerboarding gets men all riled up. And I don’t mean “men” as a pronoun for all genders, I mean male humans. Come on, you’ve never seen a group of women all vexed and loquacious over checkerboarding. It doesn’t happen.

Furthermore, checkerboarding induces these self-same men to deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate. They make up new vocabulary, talk in cryptic terms about bloom dates and nectar flows, and schedule manipulations based on the number of weeks before other things might happen. They write in long dense paragraphs about what the bees are thinking—“colony awareness”—and how the bees “perceive” the changes you’ve made to their colony. Worse, they maintain bees can be “fooled.” I seriously doubt it.

All of Walt Wright’s original papers about checkerboarding—also known as nectar management—can be found online. Also, the various bee forums have endless discussions (I’ve heard these called wrestling matches) about checkerboarding. For anyone so inclined, I urge you to read these.

But if you want it simple, the theory of checkerboarding goes like this:

Every colony has two objectives. The secondary objective is survival of the species, otherwise known as reproduction. The primary objective is survival of the individual colony.

This is no different than any other living thing and is especially apparent when you think of a bee colony as a superorganism. Animals, plants, protists, or whatever all need to survive themselves in order that they may reproduce. It is the way of nature. It is not rocket science.

So, first and foremost, your colony takes care of itself. If it becomes strong enough and large enough, it will then swarm and produce another colony. But the final decision on whether or not to swarm is based on conditions in the hive. One of those conditions is the amount of food that is stored above the brood nest.

Checkerboarding changes the configuration of the “pantry” above the brood nest, which causes the bees to postpone swarming. Since reproduction is secondary to self-preservation, this really works. The bees delay swarm prep in order to clean up the mess in the pantry. Done properly, checkerboarding can greatly increase honey production and defer or prevent swarming altogether.

Most authors say that checkerboarding “fools” the bees into thinking that not enough food has been stored, so they keep storing more. But I don’t believe bees are fools. Thing is, you have gone into their hive and changed their storage system into a configuration they don’t like. They won’t leave until it’s fixed so they keep storing more honey in an effort to restore the configuration. That’s not being fooled, that’s being stubborn. They won’t swarm till the job’s done right.

By taking advantage of this stubbornness, you can harvest extra-large quantities of honey and keep those bees working for you instead of winging over to your neighbor’s swarm trap. In addition, you get to head into winter with a large and robust colony.

Many misconceptions surround checkerboarding. The most common one is that it interferes with the brood nest. It does not. Checkerboarding is performed in the honey storage areas above the brood nest, not in the brood rearing areas, so it is an excellent and non-invasive swarm management technique.

Next time I will review some of the more obscure checkerboarding vocabulary—important to beekeepers if not to bees—and take a look at how checkerboarding is done.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

X-Files Season IV Episode 3 "Home"

Backfilling the brood nest

Rusty — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:26:27 +0000

In everyday English, to “backfill” means to refill. So if you want to plant a bush, bury a conduit, or repair a water main, you dig a hole, do what you have to do, and then put the dirt back in. Simple enough. The meaning is only slightly different in beekeeping, but different enough to be confusing.

In beekeeping, backfilling refers to filling an empty brood cell with honey or sometimes pollen. In other words, a cell that previously held one or more generations of developing bees, is now used to store food.

This may occur at different times of year. For example, in the fall when the colony has finished drone rearing, the drone cells may be filled with honey. There are several good reasons for this: drones won’t be raised again for many months, the cells are the wrong size for workers and, since they are close to the main nest, they are convenient storage areas. A well-stocked pantry right at your finger tips—er—tarsal claws!

But there is another time when bees start backfilling . . . just before swarm season. But first, let’s back up a few weeks.

In the early spring the brood nest expands in a process that is the opposite of backfilling. As the bees use up the nectar and pollen adjacent to the brood nest, they turn those empty cells into brood-rearing cells. This allows the colony to raise many more bees—enough bees to maintain the hive and prepare for winter, as well as enough bees to swarm.

Then, as swarming time gets close, the bees begin backfilling the outermost brood cells with honey. This shrinks the nest size, which in turn decreases egg laying by the queen. It means that, after the swarm leaves, the brood nest will be small enough that the remaining bees will be able to care for it. Backfilling provides a way of scaling down the entire operation so a greatly reduced workforce can still get the job done. Ingenious!

It is important to understand the concept of backfilling if want to manage swarms. Checkerboarding—a popular but often misunderstood swarm management technique—is based on this backfilling behavior. Checkerboarding should be started at the peak of brood nest expansion, just when the nest stops getting larger and begins to shrink . . . but more on that later.

Just for the record, “backfill” can also be a noun, the name for the stuff you put in the hole, as in “They already capped the backfill.”

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Backfilling a hole with dirt. Flickr photo by Archaeobobalist.

Bee sweet and don’t ask me such things!

Rusty — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 21:18:17 +0000

I was hoping no one would ask the unanswerable question, but it just arrived . . . from my daughter, of all people. She wrote, “Why do the bees hang on the outside of the swarm trap? I always envisioned them going inside.” Hmm.

When I discovered a swarm hanging from the bottom of trap #1, another swarm was occupying the inside. It seemed to me that both swarms had decided on that trap as a place to live, and both had arrived there at more or less the same time. I imagined that the first swarm took the inside and the second was forced to remain outside.

However, days later when I found a swarm on the outside of trap #2, no one else was living inside. It was completely empty. So now I’m confused.

Both swarm traps have pheromone lures mounted on the inside. The lures are attached near the entrance holes so the scent can escape from the hole and attract homeless bees. The lures are new but the traps are old. I don’t know how many seasons they’ve been hanging out there, but I’m guessing at least five. They’ve been wet and dry so many times that they became warped, and the two sections (the base and the cone) no longer fit tightly together.

My current theory is that more scent is leaking from the intersection of the two parts than is emitting from the entrance hole. The bees were clinging to that exact spot in both cases. On the other hand, I would think that when the bees were close to the trap it would be hard for them to tell which end the odor was coming from. Then again, I’m not a bee.

Another possibility is that the bees were using the trap as a temporary resting spot while they looked for a new home. In other words, they had no intention of staying there, only to use it as a staging area the way swarms do. The traps are not particularly far from the hives, so I suppose that is possible. But swarms usually settle very close to their original hive while they house hunt, and these were little far away for that. I’m just not sure.

Rusty

Are the pheromones leaking out the back?

A perfect swarm

Rusty — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 16:24:20 +0000

A week after the flurry of swarms abated and the summer solstice passed, I decided swarm season was over. As in other years, the swarms happened all at once—a storm of swarms—and now all was quiet.

Although it was late in the day and beginning to get dark, my husband suggested we walk to the upper hives. This was more for exercise than anything else. At first I hesitated, but then I agreed to go.

It was a beauteous evening, warm and peaceful. We trekked up the hill, passing bait hives and swarm traps. We stopped briefly at the top of the hill and then retraced our path.

My husband was ahead of me on the way home. Suddenly I heard an “Ohmygod!” Based on his tone, I assumed he stepped on a slug.

But when I caught up, he was staring at the swarm trap we had passed minutes earlier. Hanging beneath it was a picture-perfect swarm—huge, symmetrical, and so quiet we had missed it earlier. We were amazed.

Because it was getting dark fast, we literally ran down the hill, loaded the pickup with a bait hive, an eight-foot ladder, and a few tools. We drove up the gravel road to a spot not far from the swarm.

I prepared the hive as my husband erected the ladder. When he lifted the trap from the nail, the swarm remained all of a piece except for a few dozen bees that clung to the tree. With military precision, the bees were all parallel with heads towards the sky.

With a solid thump against the hive, I dumped the entire swarm into the top box. It dropped like lead. I have never handled such a docile swarm. It stayed put with very few fly-ups. Maybe it was the time of day or the rapidly dropping temperature. I don’t know for sure, but it was cool.

Early the next morning, I found no bees at the entrance but many bees ringing the outside of the hive near the top. A few had migrated back their former spot beneath the swarm trap. I thought perhaps they wanted an upper entrance, so I made one.

Within minutes, the bees were fanning madly at the new entrance. Within two hours everyone was inside the new hive, including the group from the swarm trap. Now, a week later, the bottom entrance is bustling and the inhabitants are as busy as . . . well . . . bees.

Rusty

A perfect swarm. The eight-foot ladder in the foreground gives an idea of the height.

One trap catches two swarms . . . at the same time

Rusty — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 17:43:31 +0000

The next morning everything was the same, that is, one swarm in the alder, one in the cypress, and one in each of the two swarm traps. I had other things to do, so I didn’t look again until noon when—you guessed it—more surprises.

The cypress swarm was still in place, but very active. The huge swarm in the alder was gone. Vanished. The uppermost swarm trap seemed to be empty as well—I saw only scouts. But the second swarm trap was overflowing with bees at the opening plus there was a humongous swarm hanging from the bottom.

Was this outer swarm the one from the alder? Or was it an entirely different swarm? I have no clue. I put a hive together and, standing beneath the swarm trap, dropped the bees into a cardboard box with a rake. I had to do this several times but, ultimately, the swarm covered all ten frames of the new box. Do I have a queen? I’ll have to wait to know for sure.

By the time I went down to the house for a break, the cypress swarm was gone. I felt bad for it because it was kind of small and wouldn’t last long. I think it was a secondary or tertiary swarm, just based on its size.

With my husband’s help, I prepared another hive and he took down the occupied swarm trap. I couldn’t believe it: the trap was level full of bees. I don’t see how they got in or out. Three small combs had been started, but I didn’t see any eggs.

Here’s my question: did one swarm decide on that bait hive after the other swarm already moved in? Or had they decided earlier, waited too long, and then arrived only to find it full? How did this all happen? The unusual stuff is never in the books . . . and almost everything bees do is unusual.

Although I have one virgin queen and two old queens in reserve, I’m going to rear some more since I just don’t know how many I’m going to need. Anyway, that’s the end of the swarm story for now. I hope it slows down because I’m flat out of bee boxes.

Rusty

The other large swarm is on the inside of this trap.

About ten minutes after raking, bees start to gather again.

Much later, my husband retrieves the second swarm.

“A swarm in June . . .” No, make that two

Rusty — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 14:30:08 +0000

The noise got louder as I walked up the hill. It was coming from the vicinity of the middle hive stand, which is on a steep incline. At first I thought the swarm was down the hill from where I stood, so for a few moments I thrashed through the underbrush looking for it. But as I listened more carefully, I realized it was overhead. My fleeting hope of catching it was dashed.

It took a long time to pinpoint the swarm because the racket from the other hives was confusing. But I finally spotted it, high in a red alder.

If you know anything at all about the Pacific Northwest coast, you know we grow trees like nobody’s business. They go up and up—nothing like those cute little saplings they have back east.

Now, nearly any bee book will tell you that a newly issued swarm will land within a few yards of the parent hive while it re-groups and decides where to live. Well, this is true if you’re talking about the horizontal direction. But while these bees landed about three yards east of the hive, they were many yards away in the vertical direction. Books never tell you that.

This was a huge swarm, much bigger than the one in the cypress. But even with a telephoto lens, I could barely see the thing. I examined the three hives below it and, of course, I couldn’t figure out where it came from. They all looked just as busy as before, although I’m sure it came from one of the three.

So, with two swarms treed within minutes of each other, I decided to check my bait hives. Three of them already had looky-loos—bees flying in, then out, examining the exterior, going back in. House hunting, I suppose, then checking out the local schools, shopping, parks, and freeway access. The swarm traps, as usual, showed no activity.

I watched the bait hives now and again till nightfall, but the swarms were quiet. It was clear they would spend the night in the trees, discussing moving companies, home inspections, and financing terms.

To be continued . . .

Rusty

You can barely see the swarm in the alder tree.