"I am curious: why is swarm tendency a big concern?"

I have six weeks to make my spring honey crop.  Roughly from mid May to July1.  In a good year I get 30 pounds in July off my very best hives and nothing off average hives.  And a loss of honey in August in my best hives.  A swarm or split before mid May equals zero honey from that hive that spring.  A swarm or split June 1 can mean very little honey from that hive that year. A hard cold rain during the first couple of days of locust bloom ends that bloom (happened the last three years) and cuts spring honey production by 1/3.  One year in ten we get a huge basswood bloom late June and early July and make record amounts of spring honey.  Except it tastes so much of mint it is awful unless blended with a lot of other honey.

Hives that swarm in the spring late may make a spring crop.  A swarm or split sometime in the spring probably will make a small fall golden rod crop if you feed them, but I have never had one make any spring crop.  One out three of my customers tells me golden rod tastes like cat pee.  That is a quote from one of them.  The rest of us like it a lot.  Everyone likes spring honey.  Except bass wood.

Then there are fall swarms.  They all die as they do not have time to build up for winter.  The parent colony generally dies over winter also as they have no time to recover and there may not be many drones for the new queen to mate with.

We are not all so lucky as to have nectar flows that last several months and very mild winters with no sub zero temps like you have.  if I could buy a bee that never swarmed I would be a happy camper.  It is dirt easy to make queens and grow a two frame nuc to wintering size by feeding sugar without robbing any resources from production hives if you winter a few nucs. This gives a easy way to increase your hive numbers.  Or have replacements for dead production hives.  And it is a lot safer than trying to get a swarm off a limb 40 feet off the ground.

Tell me what good it is to triple my hive count by swarms and splits if it means zero honey production and having to feed every one of those swarms or splits 50 pounds of sugar so they can make it thru the winter.  Where I live that is exactly what swarms and splits buy me.  I suppose you could split in March here and use purchased queens and get a spring crop.  But trying shipping queens when temps are freezing most nights and see what happens.  My last snow date is April 12 and last hard frost mid May.

Dick

HL Mencken said: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. "

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