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] ------------------------------------------------------------------------