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My bees swarmed right after installation

This is most likely to happen when you install a package of bees in a brand new, never-been-used hive. I’ve heard people say it’s the smell of new lumber they don’t like, or it’s the glue in plywood, or it’s the odor of paint. But it may just be that the bees are not in love with the place, and they would rather live elsewhere. Technically, they have not swarmed; they have absconded. Swarming is colony reproduction that produces two colonies from one. Absconding means all the bees left in one cohesive group. In other words, it is still only one colony—not two—and it lives somewhere inconvenient for the beekeeper.

The problem is easy to prevent. The package of bees will not leave without their queen, so if the queen can’t leave, the bees will stay and start to build comb. Once the comb-building process has begun—and the hive begins to smell like home—you can release the queen and relax.

To keep the queen home, you can leave her in the queen cage until comb-building is underway or you can use a swarm guard, which is like a queen excluder, across the entrance. Beekeeper Jim Withers pointed out that in Langstroth hives you can also use a regular queen excluder placed just under the lowest brood box. In any case, the queen should be released from her cage as soon as comb appears. Queen excluders need to be removed before any drones emerge.

I had several packages abscond at the prison where I taught beekeeping, all from top-bar hives. Since then, I always sequester the queen if the wood is new, or I install several bars of used brood comb—the darker the better—to start them off. This is the same type of comb you would use in a bait hive. Even though it looks disgusting, it is full of odors the bees find irresistible. Go figure.

But what about those old combs? Shouldn’t old black combs—which may contain pesticide build-up or disease—be rotated out of the hive? Absolutely. I handle this by using combs that are almost ready to retire, but not quite. For example, if you retire combs after four years, use three-year-old combs for baiting a hive or starting a colony on new wood. The following year you can rotate them out of the hives.

Excluding your queen . . . or not

Do I use a queen excluder? The answer is “absolutely.” As a matter of fact, I used one all winter to keep my dog out of the chicken yard. It fits perfectly over a hole in the fence and was easy to install with cable ties.

Oh, you mean for bees? Heavens, no. Never, never. I’m of the group that believes a queen excluder is a honey excluder. Not only that, they are in the way and always gummed up with propolis. I tried them one year and gave up.

So how do I keep my queen out of the honey supers? Simple. I put a section honey super directly above the brood chamber and put the rest of the honey supers above that. No queen in her right mind will venture into a section super to lay eggs. It simply isn’t regal enough. A queen wants a mansion, not a cubicle. She wants her family altogether in one place, not in separate rooms.

Okay, once in a great while a spirited queen will wander up and try it out, but as soon as the thrill is gone, she will wander down whence she came. About once every three years I find a couple of sections with a row of brood at the bottom, but it doesn’t happen often enough to worry about.

It doesn’t matter if you use square or round sections, either one works fine for this purpose. Above the section super you can put any type of honey super you like, including more section supers, cut-comb supers, or extracting supers. The queen just doesn’t want to go there.

With this method you can stop worrying about whether you are excluding the queen, the honey, or the drones. Rather than getting a headache from all that fretting, you get a super of comb honey instead. And if the colony fills the sections quickly—and some do it better than others—you can always pull out the sections and replace them with empties.

In the meantime, keep that excluder for something useful.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Re-thinking the queen excluder

This morning a reader from Roseburg, Oregon commented on The queen excluder controversy which reminded me of some observations I made this summer while experimenting with queen excluders.

I discovered that my colonies with excluders produced just as much honey as those without. However, the colonies with excluders seemed to follow a different protocol for honey deposition.

In my apiary the colonies without excluders built vertically more quickly than those with them. In other words, they completely filled seven or eight sides in the uppermost brood box, then five or six sides in the first super, three or four in the second super, and maybe two in the third super. It looked like a chimney effect: the honey appeared to be pulled up the center of the hive like smoke in a chimney.

In those hives with excluders I noticed a tendency for the bees to completely fill the brood boxes before moving into the first super–every cell not containing brood or pollen was filled with honey. This could be construed as good or bad, depending on how you look at it. It’s bad if you believe too much honey in the brood box causes swarming, good if you are hoping to overwinter your bees without having to constantly feed.

I believe that swarming is more apt to be triggered by an abundance of bees than an abundance of honey (“Help! There’s too much food! Let’s leave!”) but that is a separate question. Here I’m just looking at the pattern of honey storage.

Those beekeepers who wait (patiently) for their bees to fill the lower boxes with honey will find that the bees eventually go through the excluder and store more. I think that beekeepers who try to force them through the excluder, or those who run the risk of getting brood in their honey supers by not using an excluder, are just being impatient.

I also think that those who wait (and wait and wait) for the bees to go through the excluder on their own will be in a better position for overwintering. They will have ample supplies of honey throughout the brood boxes and will have do less feeding in the long run.

Of course, if you are the type of beekeeper who would rather take every drop of honey you can and then feed sugar to compensate, you would be better served by dispensing with the excluder and letting them chimney. But I hope you’re not that beekeeper.

I think the belief that a queen excluder is just a honey excluder is embraced mostly by those beekeepers too impatient to let the bees do it their own way and on their own schedule.

Just for the record, the colonies on which I used excluders this year are the heaviest I’ve ever produced—further evidence that colonies with excluders produce just as much honey . . . they just put it in different places. I managed a good harvest as well, but I am elated at the prospect of feeding less.

Rusty

HoneyBeeSuite.com

Should a new super go on the top or the bottom?

Putting a new super on top of existing supers is called “top supering.” Adding it above the brood box but below the other honey supers is called “bottom supering.” Which is best?

While honey bees remain indifferent to the entire subject, beekeepers get atwist over the mere thought of doing it wrong. In truth, there is no wrong. Do what makes you happy.

Arguments for top supering go like this:

  • It’s faster. You just drop the new one on top.
  • It’s less work. You don’t have to lift the other supers off and put them back on.
  • It’s easier to see when you need to add yet another super. You just take off the lid and look.
  • A filled super left just above the brood nest acts like a queen excluder. Because the queen wants to keep the brood nest together in one place, she will not cross a barrier of honey to lay eggs in  a new location.

And arguments for bottom supering go like this:

  • Bees begin working in the new super sooner if it is close to the brood nest.
  • It reduces travel stain because the bees don’t have to walk over capped honey to get to the new storage area. (Clean cappings are important for comb honey producers.)
  • Bees expend less energy because they don’t have to walk so far.

A paper published in the American Bee Journal by Jennifer Berry and Keith Delaplane (2000) found no statistically significant differences in honey yield between the two methods of supering. But still, the battle rages on.

My own preference is for top supering–and weight is the reason. I don’t move honey-filled supers anymore than I have to. I usually put section honey supers directly above the brood nest. These act like queen excluders because queens don’t seem to like those little boxes. Once that super starts to fill I add either another section super or a shallow super, but I never need a queen excluder.

I’ve reduced travel stain over my section honey by giving the bees an upper entrance–one that opens directly above the highest super. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s pretty good.

For those of you who still can’t decide whether to super above or below, I strongly recommend doing both. Just trade some of the frames in the old super for frames in the new one. If you put capped honey in the middle of the bottom box you will still get the “queen excluder effect” most of the time and the presence of honey in the upper box will attract workers to it. The bees can fill the remaining frames in any order they like.

Rusty

How to make bees go through a queen excluder

Beekeepers often call them “honey excluders” for a good reason: worker bees hate to go through them. The theory I hear most frequently is that the bees don’t want to build comb in places where the queen can’t go. But there are ways to entice your bees through the queen excluder.

  • One way is to simply leave the excluder out of the hive until the bees have started to draw comb in two or three of the honey frames. Once they are “committed” to the project, you can usually add an excluder with good results.
  • For a really stubborn batch of bees, you can put one frame of uncapped brood in the honey super. Pick a frame without drone brood, if possible. Make sure the queen is down below, put the excluder over the brood boxes, and put the honey super with one frame of brood above that. The workers will go through the excluder to attend to the brood. Any drones that hatch above the excluder will need to be released.
  • New frames in the honey super can be sprayed with sugar syrup to entice bees through the excluder. I find it works best if you add a few drops of essential oil to the syrup. Anise oil or teatree oil work especially well.

Follow the link for more about using queen excluders.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite