I need help
I was aware that there were uncapped queen cups in the brood box, first saw charged queen cups about 3 weeks ago, initially, I thought that they were succession cells because there were only a few clustered in the top third of a frame, and figured it was best to leave them alone. I did my next inspection 2 weeks later and found a few more. I was going to do a split next week to prevent swarming
My bees swarmed about 2 hours ago, I was just walking up from looking at where they’d landed (in a tree far too high to get to them) and I saw that they appeared to be doing a secondary swarm (there were bees everywhere flying up from the hive a second time).
when looking for the second swarm I found that almost all of the first swarm was gone from their previous location. I checked the windows on my flow supers and found that they were full of bees again (I looked in the window after the first swarm and found them quite empty when compared to a few days ago). Was this a practice swarm? I have no idea. if so I assume this means that they will swarm for real tomorrow.
now I am wondering what to do, should I go down and remove any remaining queen cells if there are any, or should I split the colony now or do something else entirely. I was planning on splitting the colony next weekend to prevent this from happening but now i just have no idea
any help apreciated
Edit: I forgot to mention my location I am in Brisbane qld
You need to assess the scale of Bee numbers and resource loss. I would avoid touching the queen cells on account that any future bee numbers rely on the resulting queens.
Dont take this to heart, you can can recover from this provided you take the necessary steps.
I am responding because its prudent to act quickly, my experience with swarming is limited so im doing all i can to mitigate the hive swarm instincts on my two hives.
@JeffH & @Dawn_SD will hopefully provide thier insights soon.
I would do some hard walk away splits in your case and make sure all boxes have some queen cells. This will simulate swarming and reduce the urge to swarm. Later if you don’t want lots of hives you could either sell the excess or simply recombine them.
I think this is what I should have done.
I tried a tarnov split with the same end goal of recombining the 2 separate colonies later in the year
Unfortunately, it then rained before all the bees could finish separating so I did my best to dump as many of the bees not back in the original hive into the new box
It was messy and raining and I’m not sure if they are going to stay in there or move back to the original boxes, I will have to see how they’re going in a few days
If I did a walk-away split what would be the effect of putting queen cells in each box be? obviously, this is tp ensure that each colony has a queen but would it be a problem if the box with the old queen also has queen cells in it? I am not great at queen-spotting