This hive started in April, only 2 months old and they seem to have swarmed. I have 2 deep boxes. As I was checking I didn’t notice a big difference in bee population, but I did see a new queen, as the one you see in the picture.
I was working on this hive a week ago and I didn’t look deep enough to see the swarm cell. It must’ve happened very recently. I couldn’t see any swarms on any trees around my property, however there’s a forest behind my property and they probably found a good spot.
Keep an eye out for more swarm cells. Some hives keep the urge to swarm and will have several cast offs. It would greatly weaken a new hive. If you find more swarm cells you can remove them. If it were a big hive I would say split the hive and endup with 2 or 3
Yes, I might as well continue this 5 yr old conversation. Because “My Hive Swarmed”.
It was only that I took a nuc, making a new queen down to my main bee site this morning that I witnessed a swarm leave a strong hive. It landed high up in a distant tree.
I have been splitting strong colonies, however I didn’t get to this one in time.
What do I do now? To answer my question: I had resources, so I split the remainder of the colony, while observing full frames of sealed & emerging bees, with swarm cells. I took enough brood with queen cells & bees to bring home to split into 3 small colonies this afternoon. I’ll also split the remainder into 2 colonies, seeing as I have enough frames containing queen cells. I put some of the honey frames into another honey super of another hive. I put the rest, with bees in the split I brought home.
The heat & humidity has slowed my down greatly in recent days. I’ll have to ignore that & get my act together to concentrate on not letting any more colonies swarm.
Just an update: it became obvious that I was a bit ambitious in thinking I could split the split 3 ways. I split it 2 ways & took one to our doctor’s place. I couldn’t resist getting a photo of this frame that almost resembles the one of @Doug1’s.
PS, I did some rough calculations: By counting length by the depth. I reduced it to 70 from 72 for the length & multiplied it by 37 = 2590. Round it back to 2500 x 2 = 5000 bees will emerge out of that frame., which is basically half the population of a normal nuc. People ask me how many bees in the nucs I sell. I reply 10,000.
Great looking frame of brood Jeff…and your numbers indicate a queen laying at capacity with a matching workforce of nurse bees to keep up with her…or her to keep up with the nurse bees (which is more likely).
Like you I run only 9 frames in a 10 frame Langstroth broodbox…continually expanding that broodnest horizontally so that under ideal conditions, at least 50,000 bees are reared every brood cycle (3 weeks) from those 9 frames. For me this means adding one box to the hive every 3-4 weeks…but that is just to make room for the bees…not honey and pollen.
The only time I see a swarm cell with a frame like you have posted above is if the bees start back-filling potential brood cells with nectar…so it looks like your move to make a nuc from that particular colony was spot on!
