Another ‘why did my bees swarm’ topic

Beekeeping - Basics
21

Hi @cathiemac,

I think you may have done what I did (correct me if I am wrong), in that you left the split which will make the emergency cells, in the position of the original strong hive, and you put the old queen in a hive in a new spot. I did this because I read it was a good idea, in that the new split that has no queen (and thus quite a long gap between the emergence of new bees from any new queen to bring the colony back on track) would stay strong with the foragers coming back to it. The problem with this strategy seems to be that the field bees keep the colony so strong that it will possibly swarm - after all it has many queens.

I found that when I opened the hive up to have a look at what was happening, those guard bees that @Dee advises about, get distracted from their duties and the imprisoned queens burst forth from the cells right before you eyes and with great urgency. Many queens are then free.

I am confused about checkerboarding as I thought that was something done with the honey frames not the brood frames?

22

Dan, you are quite right that I did leave the original hive in situ. And I too have opened the hive to find three virgin queens free and walking round - two in the flow frames above an excluder which was astonishing to me. I did post about it but no one commented on that particular point. I had read the thorax was too large for them to get up into the super but that’s where I found them.

1 Like
23

Yes…potential problem worth noting with a split.:blush:
I thought I read once, that the thorax of the queen didn’t grow bigger after emergence, so if that is the case, how strange that the queens got through. Sorry I missed your post about that before.