Dave Green writes:
> John M. Moote wrote:
> >  Since I'm new at this, I'm not completely sure what I was
> looking at but it looked like swarm cells.  I checked a book later and it
> appears that I was right.
<snip>
>    The empty frames go into the old hive on the new stand.  Whichever side
> gets the queen will get her.  Neither side is likely to swarm right away, as
> they both have been sufficiently weakened, and they'll think they succeeded
> in reproducing....
 
[Lots of excellent advice omitted]
 
A caveate here and (I think anyway) an amusing anecdote.   A  friend  in
this situation made an artificial swarm like this, and put the old queen
in the new location and left the rest of the colony in the old location.
Within  the  hour,  the  old bees on the old site noticed that "mum" had
gone, and mum on the new site noticed that the old bees  had  gone,  and
the  whole lot tried to catch up with each other and .....  swarmed.  Of
course, if you want to arrange a swarm for a public demo this could be a
way to do it. Maybe this phenomenon is geograpically influenced.
 
Regards,
--
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