I have often heard the suggestion to practice as a swarm control method to
place a box of drawn comb beneath the brood chamber.

As it happens, I have had the chance to test this method on 150 colonies in
a trial this spring.  What I found was that the bees were adverse to move
down across the gap between the boxes, but rather used that space to
produce swarm cells.  The colonies would generally completely plug out the
upper box (I mean REALLY heavy) before moving into the box of dark or light
drawn comb below.  Even colonies that had not yet filled or covered all the
frames in the upper boxes still often started swarm cells before moving
into the box below.

So we reversed all boxes for 150 hives  a few days ago.  By Day 3, many had
rapidly moved up.  I will let you know what we observe as swarm season
progresses here in California.

-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html