REGARDING RE>Good management and swarm prevention
Laura, from Maryland, writes:
>I have been told year after year to reverse the brood chambers every 7 to
>10 days. This, I am told prevents congestion in the hive. However, I have
>read that some believe this does nothing more than disrupt the bees. What
>do you all think? What are other more effective alternatives that you have
>had success with?
>I have also noted that some people here are convinced that cutting queen
>cells is useless since the bees already have it in mind to swarm and nothing
>will stop them. If this is true, then how effective is it to cut swarm
>cells? Is it even worth doing?
My personal management technique is to reverse the hive bodies in the spring,
when I clean up the winter mess and medicate. This puts the brood area
usually on the bottom of the hive. Then I watch, and if a hive is becoming
particularly strong, I may reverse hive bodies again in about a month, but
that is all. I never regularly touch the hive bodies during the honey flow,
when the supers are on (too much work, for one thing!).
If I see swarm cells during a late spring inspection, I will often cut them
and search for the rest as well, but I realize that this hive will probably
swarm anyway. If the colony has been a good one, I save the queen cells and
make a lot of splits from it, giving each split a frame with one or more good
queen cells. Then I put the queen in a hive body with maybe only one frame of
brood, the rest empty or with stores. That way I don't have to worry about
looking for a swarm and I end up with several new colonies from a good parent
queen. (I take the splits out of the original yard, or the bees would drift
back to the original hive location.)
To prevent all this fuss in the first place, every colony should be requeened
once a year. Probably the best time to do this is in the late summer, but I
have so much going on with honey harvest, etc., at this time that my practice
is to requeen in the spring. A requeened colony rarely swarms.
Ted Fischer
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