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