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Every spring I re-queen my strongest hives in order to reduce swarming. A colony is less likely to swarm when the queen’s pheromones are strong, and the pheromones are strongest in a first-year queen. In fact, according to most sources, a new queen is the single best deterrent to swarming. However, it seems ridiculous [...] In contrast to a swarm-control split where you need to know the whereabouts of your queen, a walkaway split can be made without having to find the queen. The steps for setting up a walkaway split are easy: Examine the brood nest of the hive you want to split and look for eggs. Split [...] Last time I wrote about a simple way to split a hive to prevent swarming. It is quick and easy and results in two fairly equal hives. However, if your original hive is loaded with swarm cells you may be able to raise a few extra queens or start more than one hive. Let’s [...] Hives can be split for many reasons. A beekeeper may split a hive in order to increase the number of hives, to raise queens, to increase the number of workers, or to keep a hive from swarming. There are dozens of ways to do a split, depending on what you are trying to do [...] It is totally presumptuous to say we know what’s going through a colony’s mind, but it seems that bees swarm for two reasons: the colony is crowded or the colony wants to reproduce. If the colony wants to reproduce, the “plans and preparations” have been going on for quite a while before it actually [...] Honey bees actually have two types of reproduction. The first type is the kind we normally think of—the queen mates, lays eggs, and new bees are born. The second type is whole-colony reproduction. This occurs when the colony splits into two parts. One part—comprising perhaps 40 to 70 percent of the hive population—leaves with [...] |
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