This sounds like quite a complex procedure however its really not. This is a way of changing all the frames in one go.
You will need a new brood box with a full set of new frames and foundation. Place this new box on top of your existing brood box, put a feeder and syrup feed on top and let the bees start drawing out the comb. Once the bees have drawn out some of the comb find the queen and place her up in the top brood box. Put a queen excluder in-between the two boxes, so that the queen cannot get back down.
You can use a split board if you have one; this is a queen excluder with an entrance on it. If you do use a split board open the entrance and close off the bottom entrance. You can, if you prefer, rotate the floor so the bottom entrance is now at the other side, the bees will leave by that entrance but return to the other side of the hive and find the new entrance above. Close the bottom entrance the following day. If you decide to not rotate the floor but just close the entrance in the position it is in, the bees will find the exit so don’t worry.
Equally, if you don’t have a split board just use a queen excluder and the original entrance. The advantage of using the split board is that the bees won’t travel through the lower box storing pollen around the brood that is still down there. Instead, they will store pollen in the top box where the queen is now laying. Make sure you put a feeder with syrup on the bees and keep feeding for as long as needed.
After 3 weeks all the brood will have emerged from the frames in the lower box and you can now remove it along with the queen excluder. The wax can be rendered or burn along with the frames.
Recently I have taken a number of calls from beekeepers who are telling me their bees have absconded. So what does mean and why is it happening?
Let’s look at what Absconding means first – This is when the entire colony leaves the hive, they will be preparing in advance of going, just like they would if they were swarming. The queen will be slimmed down so she can fly, the workers will have scouted for a new place to move to and they will fill their stomachs with honey when they go. But, unlike a swarm, the whole colony will go leaving not a single bee in the hive. You may find you still have some sealed brood and stores left behind but that will be all.
So, the next question is why have they gone? Well the truth is that there is still very little understood about why bees abscond. There are however some observations that can draw us to certain conclusions for individual cases. It is known that certain conditions have been present when bees have absconded:
Nectar dearth – a severe shortage in nectar flow which will inevitably see a reduction of stored food in a colony, especially a colony that is growing fast.
Predators – if the colony is constantly under attach by predators, this could be wasps, hornets, ants, wax moths etc
Constant disturbance – if the colony is constantly being disturbed by animals, humans or even noise, this can be a driver in seeing them move on.
Sever hot weather – overheating in the hive, especially a hive that is overcrowded.
Varroa – High levels of varroa cause a lot of stress on a colony.
Honeybees have a natural instinct for survival so you can see why the reasons above make sense – moving to a new home due to lack of forage in their current location, or being invaded by other insects does sound like a good plan! Equally if the bees were being constantly disturbed you can see why they may like it and decide to move home.
Hot weather will generally see our bees bearding. This is where they hang outside of the entrance of the hive. It has been reported, that in prolonged extreme temperatures, the bees have been known to leave the hive and not return. However I have heard of this happening in the UK.
The point about varroa is defiantly worth taking onboard. It is known that in un-managed colonies high levels of varroa have been found in whats left of the brood nest. So, it would not be wrong to suspect that the same can happen in managed colonies where the varroa levels are high too.
I hope that this in someway provides maybe an insight into what happened to your bees. There maybe somethings you can do to mitigate it happening again.
This is a very effective way of quickly changing all your brood frames and will result in removing all pathogens from the hive, it can however be quite stressful for the bees, so you need to ensure you have a good quantity of young bees in the colony before you carry out the shook swarm.
The best time to do the shook swarm is late spring, you should have plenty of young bees by this point. The method is quite simple: Lift your brood box off the floor and move it to one side. Place a queen excluder on the floor then place a a new clean brood box, containing brand new frames and foundation, on top of the queen excluder. Remove 5 or 6 of the center frames to create a gap. Now go to your original brood chamber and remove the first frame. Shake all the bees off this frame into the gap you created in your new brood box. Repeat with all the frames, look for the queen as you go. Personally I would lift the queen off the frame and place her into the new brood box, you can just shake her in if you prefer. If you didn’t see the Queen throughout the procedure do check the walls of the old brood box and make sure she is not there. Shake any bees left on the brood box walls into your new box too.
Gently replace the 5 or 6 frames back into the gap in your new brood box, place the crownboard on top along with a feeder full of syrup. Keep this feeder topped up until your bees have sufficient stores in their new frames. The queen excluder on the floor will stop the queen from leaving and taking the bees with her. Once your queen is happily laying you can remove the queen excluder (2 weeks is a good bet)
The old frames you removed that have stores in them can be extracted and the wax rendered, any frames with brood in are best burnt. If you do extract stores from these frames, make sure you are confident they are stores of honey and not syrup that you may have offered in your winter preparations.
Carrying out a shook swarm on a colony with a good volume of young bees will very quickly work the new foundation in your frames, you may be quite surprised how quickly this happens. Do ensure they have a constant supply of syrup.
What you feed your bees will be dictated by the time of the year and why you need to feed them. In most cases, with the exception of the winter months, you will feed your bees with a syrup, this may be a manufactured product designed especially for the honey bee, or you may decide to make your own syrup using sugar and water. There are advantages and disadvantages to both which I have listed at the bottom of this blog.
As a rule of thumb, you will feed fondant during the winter months. You can use fondant all year round but if your bees are desperate for food, close to starvation, then offering them fondant is not going to be effective. Offering a starving colony syrup can save them, before you put the syrup in the feeder, trickle some syrup directly onto the bees and onto the tops of the frames. The bees will be able to use it straight away and it can make the difference between life and death for your colony. Make sure you check the colony the next day and top up the feeder as necessary.
Ideally you will always leave your bees with enough stores to get them through the winter months, but if something has gone wrong and you find, as you are preparing them for winter, that they are short of stores, then you must feed them. There will be no forage out there for them once the Ivy has gone, so if they are short of stores, they will not survive. At this time of the year you should be offering your bees a syrup feed in a rapid feeder or some other sort of top feeder. They can easily move the syrup down and store it in the brood area ready for when they need it. A colony needs roughly 40lb honey/stores to get through winter months, I have a blog dedicated to how much stores do my bees need for winter.
Winter – If your bees are short of food during the winter months you offer them fondant, not syrup. You assess what stores they have by weight, the process is called hefting. Read the blog mentioned above for more detail on this, you must feed them fondant which is placed directly over the central hole in the crownboard. The bees will not leave the cluster to move up into a feeder to take syrup, they will only be able to access food that is directly over them.
Spring – Spring feeding is often needed most because the colony has come through winter and is starting to expand. The weather is unpredictable and we often find that stores are down to a minimum. If your bees need feed in the spring this is most commonly done with syrup however I do know of some bee farmers that only feed fondant all year around. I don’t really understand this as fondant is more expensive for the bees and generally, but not always, they will feed off the fondant from the packet rather than move it down into the brood nest.
Mid-Season – You may need to feed mid-season if there is a dearth in the nectar flow. There is something called a “June Gap”, it’s not always in June, some years its earlier and some years its later. The June gap can be for just a few days, and you barely notice it, or may last for a few weeks. It’s the time of the year when the spring flowers end but the summer ones have not quite got going. This is a critical time for honeybees as the Queens will now be laying at the maximum, the colonies will be full of brood which needs feeding, and the bee numbers will also be very high. If you have taken a spring harvest off and not left enough on the bees and we do get a June gap your bees may be a risk of running out of stores. At this time of the year you should be feeding syrup. I recall one year we didn’t do a spring harvest, as we just didn’t have time, and that particular year the June gap was long, some of our sites were more badly affected and the bees had eaten through all the spring forage. It was fortunate that we hadn’t harvested or we would have had to feed the bees.
Nucs/Splits – If you are making up a nucleus/split then the chances are your going to give the bees new foundation to draw out, or you may have drawn comb but it won’t have stores in it. In this situation you will need to feed your bees, again, syrup would be the best feed for them.
Swarms – Offer any swarms you take in a feed by way of syrup but, don’t feed them for a few days. If you feed them straight away you may find they have gone when you next check! A swarm carries enough food with them, in their honey stomachs, for 3 days. Leave them to settle into the new home you have chosen for them for a few days then put a syrup feed on to help them. If they are on new foundation they will need a lot of food to draw the comb.
Shook Swarm / Swarm control – If you carry out a shook swarm onto new foundation you will also need to feed the bees. Likewise, if you carry out some swarm control methods like an artificial swarm, and you use new foundation, you will need to feed the bees; syrup would be the choice.
Pollen Substitute – This is a type of fondant that also has pollen in it, your bees need protein and carbohydrates, the pollen is the protein. If your bees are short on pollen stores this will affect colony growth and colony development. You can offer your bees pollen patties on the crown board or directly onto the tops of the brood frames. You will most often hear of pollen substitutes being fed in early spring. It will help the colony to get going.
I have listed below, what I consider, to be the advantages and dis-advantages, of feeding honeybees syrup that is made especially for them, against making syrup with household sugar and water.
Pre-made Syrup for Honeybees (Ambrosia)
ADVANTAGE
DISADVANTAGE
Made for bees, is close to nectar in composition, therefore could be considered to be better for your bees
Slightly more expensive than mixing your own
Has a very long life
No aroma so can be fed anytime of the day
Is ready to use, no mixing required
Bees can use if straight away it has very low water content
Mixing your own Sugar and Water
ADVANTAGE
DISADVANTAGE
Marginally cheaper than buying pre-made
Does not keep long before it starts to ferment – fermented syrup can give the bees dysentery
Has an aroma so can encourage robbing if fed during the day
Needs preparation time. You don’t to make too much and waste it
Can be toxic to bees if overheated
In order to store it they need to be reduce the water content, this uses more energy, which in turn means they consume more
You have just been through your bees and have found lots of queen cells. Most of them are probably along the bottom of the frames. These will be swarm cells and if you have been doing weekly inspections they should not yet be sealed and the original queen should still be in the hive and you should still have eggs. If however you have delayed checking your bees and its been longer than 9 days since you last inspected them you may well find you have sealed queen cells and no eggs and your queen has probably gone already with half the bees from the colony. If this is the case then you are too late to perform an artificial swarm. All you can do now is remove all but 1 queen cell, we would normally leave the best one we can find, we would normally leave an unsealed one if possible. By removing the other queen cells your colony is less likely to throw off any casts, (or anymore casts as it may well have thrown some already!) Now close the hive back up and leave the bees to it. All being well the new queen will emerge and go on her mating flights and start to lay. This can take a few weeks and you do not want to disturb them during this time. I always leave mine for a good 3 weeks but I do keep an eye on the entrance. If the bees are bringing in pollen this is a good indicator that all is well. Check them in around 3 weeks time and you should see some eggs. If you don’t see eggs look for polished cells as this means the queen is imminently going to start laying.
If you have been doing weekly checks then the queen should still be there and you can perform an artificial swarm, also known as the pagden method however this is simplified version. You will need an additional hive with stand and brood frames. Feeder and syrup.
What you are aiming for is to create the situation whereby your bees think they have swarmed but without them actually swarming. The main different between what you are about to do and what actually happens when the bees swarm is that you will be separating the queen and the flying bees from the main colony and the brood and you will leave all the none flying bees in the original hive, on a new location, with one queen cell and the brood.
When bees swarm naturally the swarm will consist of bees of all ages not just the flying bees. In a swarm the bees also fill their honey stomachs with honey just before they leave, this is ensure they have food to start off their new colony. In this procedure your bees won’t do this so you will also need to feed the bees.
So, you are checking your bees and you have lots of queen cells but the queen is still there and you may or may not have eggs. Gather all the equipment you need before you start and then move the existing colony to one side but over 3 feet away. Now set up your new hive in the exact spot where you have just moved the colony from. You should already see flying bees returning to this new hive. Remove 1 brood frame from this new hive and take it with you to the colony you have moved.
Go through the colony you have moved and find the queen, she should be on a frame of brood. Take the queen and the frame with open brood and put these into the center of new hive which is located where this colony was before you moved it. Check the frame to ensure there are no queen cells on it, remove any you see. If the original colony had super with honey you can move these over to the new hive as well. If you don’t have supers with honey in them instead you will need to feed the new hive. Use a rapid feeder or something similar with syrup. All the flying bees will be returning to this hive and thus you have created an artificial swarm.
Now go back to the original colony and go through each frame of brood thoroughly and remove all but one good queen cell. It is best to find your good cell first before you destroy all the others, to help with this you could mark the top of the frame with the good cell on as you go through then you know which one has the good cell on it. Once you have left only 1 queen cell close this hive up too. Once that has been done you can leave the bees get on with it. All being well the new queen will emerge and go on her mating flights and start to lay. 3 weeks is a good measure from the time you took the nucleus. Keep an eye on the entrance to see when the bees start to bring in pollen. Bringing in pollen this is a good indicator that all is well. When you do check them, you should see eggs. If you don’t see eggs look for polished cells as this means the queen is imminently going to start laying.
In pagans method a week after you have created the artificial swarm you move the original colony to the other side of the new hive. This is so that the flying bees return and their hive is not there, they will most likely enter the closest hive which will be the new one with the old queen. The flying bees will boost this colony but also deplete the original colony, which had all the brood, of more bees. The theory of this is that this colony may throw a cast and by depleting it of bees this is less likely to happen.
You now you have 2 colonies, if you intended on increasing your numbers then you have achieved this. If however you already had a number of colonies and you really didn’t want to expand you could unite the two colonies back together. This can be done more or less at anytime in the season. To unite them remove the old queen so that your united colony will be headed by your new young queen. Use the newspaper method to unite the bees, more can be read about this on our How to Unite Two Colonies page.
Beckys Beezzzs 