Tag: swarmcontrol

How do I make a split / Make up a nuc?

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We make up splits or nucleus for various reasons. It may be that you want to increase your colony numbers and making your own splits, if you have strong healthy colonies is a good cost-effective way of doing this. Depending on the time of the year you do the splits it may affect your honey harvest from the colony. Splits are also made as part of swarm control /prevention.

There are a couple of things you need to take in to account when making up splits. Firstly, if you are to keep the new colony in the same apiary as the parent colony the flying bees will return home. You must therefore ensure you shake extra bees into the nuc to mitigate this.

If you have several colonies, but none that are exceptionally strong, you can make a split up by taking frames from multiple colonies. It would be best practice to take bees from 3 colonies not 2 as it is said that bees from 2 colonies will fight but from 3 or more, they will not as there will be confusion with the different pheromones.

And lastly, you need to make sure that the colony/colonies you are splitting from, are strong and disease free.

Equipment you will need is a nucleus hive, these usually take 5 or 6 frames. These are available in both wood and polystyrene; the advantage of the polystyrene is that they are lighter, which makes moving them much easier.

A rule of thumb is that a split is made up with 2 frames of brood and 1 frame of food. You can of course put in an extra frame of brood but ensure that you have enough bees to cover all the brood. So, all frames of brood that go into the nuc should be covered with bees. Make sure these brood frames have plenty of sealed brood rather than wet brood on them, this will ensure you have young bees quickly which will help the nuc to grow.

If you are making up a split from a colony that is throwing up queen cells and plan to use one of the cells as your new queen, make sure you remove all other queen cells on the frames and only leave one. If you are leaving the nuc on the same site as the parent colony you will also need to shake in 3 frames of bees to compensate for the flying bees that will return home! Do make sure you don’t accidentally shake the queen in from the parent colony!!

Fill the rest of the Nuc box up with new frames and foundation. If you are adding a new queen, you can do this at the same time but do observe the reaction that the bees have to the queen. You may need to leave them for an hour or two before adding her. Some beekeepers will leave the bees for a few days before adding her. The bees will of course start to make queen cells in this situation so, if you do this, ensure you go back through the frames and remove any queen cells they start before putting the queen cage in. Leave the tab on the cage and then check the frames again 2 days later for more queen cells. Remove them all and remove the tab on the queen cage at the same time. Ensure the small nuc has plenty of food, offering them syrup will help them with the new foundation they have to pull, make sure you give them enough food to last them until at least your next inspection. We recommend leaving then for 10 days now before you check to see if the queen has taken.

If you are making up a nuc using a queen cell, select a queen cell that is not sealed. This will allow you to estimate when your new queen will emerge; it will be 8 days after the cell has been sealed. The queen will hopefully mate successfully and start to lay anywhere between 2 to 3 weeks, the weather may affect this. I leave my colonies for 3 weeks before I check them for eggs. Do however, keep an eye on this colonies food stores and offer them syrup if they need feed.

Replace the frames that you have taken from the parent colony/colonies with new frames and foundation.

If it’s in the earlier part of the season that you make your nuc up, you will need to keep an eye on space and make sure you have a full hive ready for when it’s needed. If you are making your splits late in the season, they overwinter well in the nuc box.

Summary:

  • Ensure parent colony is strong and free from disease
  • If you are letting bees make their own queen, make sure you select an unsealed queen cell
  • Ensure the new colony has sufficient food to last until at least the next inspection
  • Make sure you have enough bees to cover the brood in the nuc
  • If you are leaving the bees on the same is site as the parent, shake in an extra 3 frames of bees to compensate for the bees that will fly home
  • Don’t make a nuc up from 2 colonies as the bees will fight, make it up with bees from 1 or 3 colonies

This Nuc is 2 weeks old. It was made from a single colony taking 2 frames brood, 1 frame food and adding 3 new frames with new foundation. Fed with Ambrosia Syrup.

Shook Swarm

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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.

Swarm Control Nucleus Method

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The nucleus method is good if you don’t have much spare equipment and you plan on uniting the colony back to one again.

This method may sound similar to the artificial swarm however its the other way around. In the artificial swarm you moved the parent colony away and left the queen and the flying bees on the original site. In the nucleus method you are removing the queen, a little brood and young bees and leaving the colony where it is.

You need a nuc box or full size hive with dummy board (so you can reduce the space the bees need keep warm). You have queen cells and your queen is still there. Find the queen and take her on the frame she is on, which most likely will have eggs, and also take another frame of sealed brood and a frame of food. If you are using a nuc box fill the rest of box with frames, drawn comb if you have it, foundation if you don’t but remember to feed them with syrup! You will also need to shake in a couple of frames of bees, you need to compensate for the flying bees that will return to the parent colony. Tomorrow check this nuc to ensure you have enough bees to cover the brooda and look after the colony. If one of your frames of brood had emerging brood on it then you will soon have new young bees in here as well.

The parent colony is inspected and all but one good open queen cell is removed. It is best to find your good cell first before you destroy all the others. You will need to check this colony a week later and remove any new queen cells your bees may have started, so do mark the frame that has your good cell on it so you don’t accidentally remove that one! Once you have only 1 queen cell and no way for the bees to make more 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. 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. When you do check them, 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.

Your nuc will also be growing in size over these three weeks, so you now have the option to keep this as a separate colony and hive it when necessary and increase your number of colonies. Or, you can unite this back with your original colony using the newspaper method.

Quick Update

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Thanks to those that pointed out to me about the broken links in Swarming-Management; Prevention & Control. I made an error on timings; the subjects are not yet published which is why the links are not working – rookie error!!

Nucleus Method is due to publish this Wednesday 1st March 2023

Artificial Swarm is due to publish March 6th 2023

Thanks again, hope you are enjoying our blog and that you find useful information within.

Becky and the team

Swarming – Management; Prevention & Control

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If you have honeybees, you have a duty of care for them and that includes some sort of swarm control. You must also assume that your bees will swarm every year. Why? I hear you ask. Well, swarming is the way honeybees naturally produce. Every year I get the odd customer who is buying bees from us, ask me if they can have bees that don’t swarm. The answer is no, all honeybees swarm, it is an essential part of their life cycle, if we were to breed bees that don’t swarm that would lead to there being no honeybees.

So, it is essential that as part of your honeybee management that you plan, learn, understand, and have the equipment to carry out at least one swarm control method. The idea being that if you carry out regular inspections on your bees, give them enough space at the right time, you will reduce the chances of them swarming at all because you will be in control of what is happening within the colony. However, you won’t always get it right so you must be prepared for them to lose a swarm now and then. Even if you do give them all the space in the world, a colony will still swarm as this is their natural way of reproducing just like every other animal on the planet.

Prevention – When we say Swarm Management and use the word “Prevention”, this means controlling what is happening within the colony to give them space, and therefore prevent them from swarming. The most obvious thing, at the beginning of the season, is to add supers so that the bees have storage space to put all that lovely nectar they are foraging for. You also need to keep an eye on the free space in the brood box. A good colony will move honey up from the brood box, into the space above, to allow more free cells for the queen to lay in. However, sometimes we need to help them. If your bees are actively bringing in nectar and filling supers but you have full frames of food in the brood box, which is taking up valuable laying space, you can scrape the capping off these cells which will encourage the bees to move the honey up. Or you can remove them and replace them with drawn comb, if you have it, or if not, then give them frames with new foundation.

If your colony is expanding its brood nest at a rate of knots, you will either need to offer more space for brood to be laid by adding another box, you can double brood or brood and a half: this is where you use a super as part of the brood box. This will allow more space for the brood nest to expand. If, however, you do not want to run the colony this big but want to do something to prevent them from swarming, due to lack of space, you will need to remove some frames of brood and bees and thus reduce the colony size. This will mean making up a new smaller colony as a swarm prevention method – Nucleus method. Leave the queen in the original colony to carry on, either let the nucleus make its own new queen or, if you have another colony that you have had to do swarm control on, you can take a queen cell from that and carefully press it into the top of the brood frames. Personally, I don’t like this method, but it will gain you at least 8 days for this colony to become queen right. You will need to go through the colony and remove any other queen cells they start to make, and of course, there is every chance they may pull down the queen cell you put in. If this happens just let them make their own queen. Alternatively you can introduce a mated queen to this colony, advice on how to do this can be read on my page How to Introduce a Mated Queen.

Control – When we say Swarm Control, this usually refers to how we carry out a control method on a colony that already has swarm cells, and, if left to its own devices, the colony will swarm. By controlling the swarming process, we will allow the colony to swarm, but we have the control. By controlling it we won’t lose the swarm and it will not be a nuisance, or a danger to others. You may laugh at me using the word danger but remember; your neighbours may not be quite as keen on honeybees as you are! To some people a swarm of honeybees will be very scary, so, if you have honey bees, you have a responsibility to control them. Having said that even the most skilled beekeepers and bee farmers will lose the odd swarm here and there.

I have a post that explains an artificial swarm control method that is quite simple, and you should have all the equipment you need. There are other methods such as the Demaree, which can sound quite complicated but in reality it’s not, you just need more specialist equipment. The Demaree has been modified over the years and there are now a few other versions to the original method. We use a modified version ourselves. I will write a post on this another time.

Another control method is to remove the queen from the colony to make up a small nucleus. This may sound like the artificial swarm however it’s the other way around. In the artificial swarm you are removing the colony, and leaving the queen on the original site where the flying bees will return. In the nucleus method you are removing the queen, a little brood and young bees from the colony. The original colony is left with a queen cell, or left for the bees to make a new queen if they haven’t already thrown up queen cells. I don’t use this method as I find it less affective and a lot of the time original colony still swarms a little later in the season. You can read about the Nucleus method of swarm control in a separate post.

Summary – You need to plan ahead as to how you are going to manage swarm prevention. Always remember though, no matter what method of prevention you use, if your bees need to go through a natural reproduction method, no amount of space or manipulation will prevent this. So, make sure you are equipped and ready to carry out a swarm control method. It is not fair on others to just allow your bees to swarm and cause a nuisance.