I wonder if you could help me. Last night I looked at my inspection window and the bees were crammed in and had filled most of the super although not capped. Today I went to inspect and the super was mostly empty and a lot of the honey missing. A neighbour has told me they saw a swarm of bees passing their window! I did an inspection and found some capped and uncapped queen cups. Could not find my queen and the bees were very angry and stayed outside the hive for quite some time. Lots of dead bees around my hive and drive too. I have ordered a mated queen that should come tomorrow, but now unsure what to do. I have only had the bees since end of May so really disappointed. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Hi & welcome to the forum. My question is: Can you cancel that new queen?
Lots of people order new queens unnecessarily, on account that they don’t understand what happens when a colony swarms. When a colony swarms, it makes provision for a new queen via the queen cells it produces.
Swarming is a completely natural phenomenon, it’s how bees reproduce. The time for us to step in post swarming is after about 3 weeks if we discover that the new queen failed to get mated, which is by the law of averages about 1 in 6 or 7.
We can prevent swarming in the majority of cases by preemptive swarm control splits, which I’m going to be doing on a hive after breakfast today.
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Hi Louise, ditto to what Jeff said. Don’t be too disappointed, because now you can learn from the experience and apply it to next year.
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Hi Jeff and Eva, thank you for your help and advise. I was unable to cancel the new queen but have had a good look through my brood box and could not find any queens and as I had knock out the queen cells previous day I am chancing my luck and have put the new queen in her cage in brood box. I will check in a few days. I have just had a new flow hive delivered so that I can split if need be.
Jeff hope your split went well!
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You’re welcome Louise, & thank you. I finished up removing 5 brood frames to add to weaker colonies. We’re only 3 weeks past the shortest day, however this particular colony was showing signs that it will be thinking about swarm preparations in the coming weeks if I didn’t do something.
One of the frames showed classic signs of the bees opening up the brood in 3 stages. The first stage was the constricted brood prior to the shortest day. The second stage was where the bees had removed a decent amount of honey for the queen to lay, which showed a different brood pattern to stage one. The third stage was the removal of most of the remaining honey, & replaced by eggs. I was torn between bringing it home to photograph, & adding it to a weaker colony, I chose the latter.