>>> I'd strongly recommend focusing on selecting against swarming. There may be a serious drawback to taking a colony which produced queen cells in swarm season and then splitting those to mating nucs.
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<><><> As a small scale operator wanting to expand I would disagree with this for the following reason. I would use the swarm cells to expand the number of nucs that I have on hand. I would later in the season replace these (swarm queens) with queens (cells) from queen mothers I would choose for their (seemingly) positive genetics. In this way I could rapidly expand the number of colonies during a season and end up the summer season with late summer produced queens from selected queens. Also during the expansion phase I would use modified Snellgrove boards, placed above established colonies, to augment the field force of the main colony during the honey flow and keep the new swarm cell colony at a small 5 frame size until I utilized them for mating nucs in the late summer.
Mike in LA
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