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Chris Conroy says:
>But swarming isn't as common an occurence as I would expect. Is this because
swarming isn't seen as a desirable trait and has been "bred out"?  Do bees
have a different strategy?  Or is it that beekeepers affect the bees by
constantly "fiddling around" with the hives?<
 
    Chris, you haven't been in South Carolina in late March or early April,
when spring comes early and catches us without enough equipment ready. We
often go (within a couple days) from feeding starving bees, to a frantic race
to keep ahead of swarming. You would never again think that bees aren't
programmed to reproduce, when you've seen a hundred pounds of bees hanging on
verious limbs around a bee yard..
 
  Of course that's terrible management - about like a cattleman letting all
his calves run off and get lost in the woods, so any beekeeper who wants to
stay in business is working the best he can to keep them from swarming.  But
sometimes the best we can do is not enough. Three years ago we had a
tremendous swarm season. Even the weak hives blew off.  I wonder if the loss
of competition from wild bees encouraged this, or if there was some kind of
communication, perhaps an odor that the bees in each bee yard all shared,
because they pretty much all went together.
 
   Some rules of thumb I have condensed from my experience that seem to work
MOST of the time:
 
1.  Queens in their first year may swarm, but good management can usually
stop this. This includes such things as timely supering, removal of a couple
frames of brood, etc. Crowding seems to be the major trigger, and management
that does not allow crowding to occur will USUALLY stop swarming.
 
2.  Queens in their second year seem programed to swarm, no matter what, and
it is exceedingly difficult to prevent them - a good arguement for keeping
young queens in your outfit.
 
3.  Golden Italians, such as Homer Park's stock, will produce huge colonies
that, in their first year, are quite resistant to swarming even if they do
get crowded.  During the swarmy season I referred to, I had a couple hundred
of Homer's that saved my neck, as many of the others went up before I could
work them, but Homer's stayed home and gave me lots of replacements.  I think
some of the trait is from their ancestry, but I am sure it has been greatly
enhanced by selective breeding.  (I tried once, and only once, to use some of
this stock as cell builders in my own queen breeding.  They did a lousy job
of making cells.  I have had much better success in using darker (leather
colored) Italians, or other races, as cell builders.)
 
4. Buckfast, in my experience, are quite swarmy by nature. I had a hive by my
workshop about four years ago that swarmed at least four times in one season,
and superseded at least twice more. This was a monitor of local conditions.
Every time I opened them, I marked the queen. And almost every time I opened
them to find a new queen just getting going. I watched one big swarm leave
out in late August - an unusual time to go...
 
5.  I used to try really hard to continue to select for non-swarming. When I
made up nucs, I would destroy all swarm cells and give them a grafted cell,
that I figured was of better breeding.
   However, since tracheal mites and other problems of recent years, I've
seen enough weak bees, that I have decided that bees which are strong enough
to swarm are what I really want. So when I find swarm cells today, if there
are no other bad traits, such as chalkbrood, nasty dispositions, etc., I just
use what they have already produced and am grateful that they have saved me
some work, and that I caught them before they left me.
 
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Eastern Pollinator Newsletter,    Dave Green   PO Box 1215, Hemingway, SC
  29554
:-) Man has forever passed the golden age. The modern bathtub was invented in
1862. The telephone was invented in 1876. For fourteen years you could relax
in the tub without the phone ringing.