Lucy Cronin writes:
> A friend of mine has acquired some new Buckfast queens and would like to
> clip their wings to prevent swarming. Is this a good idea? How does
> one go about this? Thanks from both of us for all advice.
I haven't seen a detailed response to this yet, so here goes:
Clipping the wings of the queen will not actually stop the bees swarming
(or trying to anyway). What it does is to confound their efforts for a
while, usually giving the beekeeper a few more days to sort out the
situation. I have seen photographs of clipped-queen colonies that have
set up home under their old hive. I have heard stories of queens being
physically carried by the workers.
In principle, the bees take nine or ten days to get from an egg intended
for a new queen to a swarm. At that time the queen cell gets capped,
the old queen takes half the colony and goes. If she can't go because
she can't fly, you have (maybe) until the first virgin before you lose
your workers. You could either artificially swarm them, remove the
queen and knock down all the cells but one, or knock down all the cells
and see if they give up their plans. Many people in the UK (me
included) use this latter approach -- personally, no more.
That's the principle and mostly it works pretty well. The bees don't
read the text books though (or if they do, their accountant is pretty
sharp), because the timetable doesn't always work. Bees can convert any
worker egg or young larva (up to about three days) into a queen
(emergency queens). That can clip six days off of the total time, so
the first virgin *could* emerge after only 10 more days. Worse, if you
have an unclipped queen they could cap and swarm in only _four_ more
days, and I know that only too well this year because five of my meagre
six colonies tried precisely that. Three succeeded (but I caught two of
the swarms), one failed because the queen was clipped and one was
revisited after three days and just in time. It's been a funny old
spring here ;-)
Personally, I'm now convinced I should clip queens. It appears not to
hurt them, although they can't be too keen on being flightless, but in
the UK at least swarms are IMHO definitely not a good idea.
How to do it? The best method I've seen so far is to catch her and hold
her with her head towards the palm on the ball of your thumb,
restraining her with your first and second finger. Cut off at least
half of at least one wing with a good fine pair of scissors.
_Don't cut her legs!!!_
A number of beekeepers here use clipping as a queen age indicator, they
don't clip the year she emerges, clip one wing in year two and the other
in year three.
Regards,
--
Gordon Scott [log in to unmask] 100332,3310 on CompuServe
Newsletter [log in to unmask] ditto
Beekeeper, Kendo Sandan, sometime sailor.
Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG22 5HP, UK
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