Gordon Scott wrote:
> [Our group of beekeepers] got
> on  to  how we should decrease the number of stocks after our artificial
> swarms, swarm capturing and so on.  Everyone  admitted  some  difficulty
> with  this, particularly in high season -- all the books tell you how to
> make increase but none seem to give  much  advice  about  restoring  the
> status quo.
 
This is an interesting subject.  Like Gordon, I have problems with it.
 
In spite of everything I do, most of my colonies make swarm preparations,
so I use artificial swarming.  This means that, by the middle of June, I
usually have at least twice as many colonies as I had 6 weeks before.  (I
try to avoid exacerbating the problem too much with swarms collected from
elsewhere by getting rid of them as quickly as possible to novices or
others who want them.)  The books imply that at this stage you should
reunite your colonies, producing strong stocks again for the summer flow.
My experience is that if I do this a certain, and sometimes large,
proportion of the colonies start making swarm preparations again due to
the sudden increase in population combined with the start of the main
summer flow.
 
A problem with small scale beekeeping is that it's difficult to control
the genetic make-up of your queens.  I suppose I could buy in new ones
but it's cheaper and more interesting to raise my own and artificial
swarming achieves this without all the complications of grafting and
special rearing and mating colonies.  However, an important part of
selective breeding is evaluation.  With the small number of queens I
raise I can't be very selective.  Things like honey-getting are
dependant on many factors other than genetics, and my sample size is not
sufficiently large.  Things I can select for are temper and following.
To evaluate this plus general health I need to allow the queen raising
colony from the artificial swarm to become well established.  This, plus
the tendency to swarm again referred to above, mean that I delay
reuniting until late July or August.  A consequence of this is that I
have to super all the colonies.
 
When I reunite, more or less at the end of the main summer flow, I know
the characteristics of all the queens I have.  I unite in such a way as
to retain the queens I want and dispose of those I don't.  There's a
presumption that I'll normally keep the younger queens but if there
aren't enough good ones I'll retain the best of the older ones too.
 
This is how I work at present.  It seems to work fairly well most of
the time but it needs more equipment than I would like.  My honey
yields seem to be as good as most other members of my local beekeeping
association and better than many.  Note that the method lends itself to
frequent replacement of brood combs, a valuable method of reducing
disease, since the artificial swarms can be started mainly on
foundation.
 
> I [Gordon Scott] personally
> expect to use the newspaper method to do the uniting with the  queen  in
> the  lower  brood  box below a QX (maybe I need a drone exit?), give the
> brood time to hatch and then move the upper box above  the  cover  board
> where I hope it will be cleaned of stores.
 
This is more or less what I do except that there's some extra complexity
due to both colonies having supers.  Shortly after uniting, I change the
order of the boxes to get all the supers on top and shuffle the brood
frames around to get the best frames and, as far as possible, most of
the brood below the queen excluder.  (Perhaps I should use a drone exit
too.  I don't like keeping them trapped above the excluder.  I'd be
interested in other people's experience here.)  After the three weeks it
takes for the last of the drone brood to emerge, quite a lot of honey
has usually accumulated in the brood box above the excluder.  I've never
had much success getting the bees to remove this so I usually end up
extracting the old brood frames.  I don't know what the answer to this
is.  I find it's not very satisfactory because it means I need an
extractor that will take brood frames and also there's a great deal of
pollen in the honey from these frames which means it must be thoroughly
filtered to prevent rapid crystallization.
 
--
Malcolm Roe                                Phone  :  +44 1442 345104
Crosfield Electronics Ltd                  Fax    :  +44 1442 343000
Hemel Hempstead, Herts. HP2 7RH, UK        E-mail :  [log in to unmask]
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