May in the Apiary

This month’s blog is mostly about swarm management and adding supers. It’s been a great start to Spring and we have seen swarms a week earlier than ever seen before, so keep giving your queens space to lay to try and prevent them going into swarm mode. As always make sure you do at least one thorough disease check, shaking bees off every frame and looking for any abnormalities in the brood. Reminder about swarm prevention – Do weekly inspections but keep the disturbance to a minimum. We find 7 brood frames is an ideal number. Continue to weaken those on 8 or 9 frames by removing capped brood or making up nucs. The main priorities are 2 to 3 frames of space to lay and spotting queen cells. Our queen rearing is now in full flow –  Remove aggressive queens and 1 week later knock back all queen cells and add eggs and young larvae from your favourite colony. Queen rearing doesn’t need to be complicated. You could just take a queenless nuc with eggs and young larvae from your favourite colony and let them requeen themselves.   Adding supers – When 10 brood frames are drawn in the brood box swap the last drawn frame with the foundation frame on the end, stop feeding light syrup and add a super above the queen excluder. Once the bees are busy in a super, add another. It’s always better to add drawn frames, We add undrawn frames on top as it’s easier and research shows it makes little difference to the speed it is drawn. It also means that any pollen stored in supers stays in the lowest super. For cut comb use thin unwired foundation or starter strips and never next to the queen excluder so they are not filled with pollen. They need a really good flow and a very full hive to be drawn and ideally just 9 castellations in the super.  Swarm control – Do not ignore queen cells. If you remove every queen cell they can still swarm within 5 days. The easiest way to prevent this is to make up a nuc with the queen, at least 1 frame of brood and 1 food frame (honey and pollen) with bees and at least 2 frames of extra bees shaken in. Move the nuc more than 3 feet away from the original colony and knock back the original colony to 1 open charged cell, We recommend 3 brood, 1 food, 1 drawn empty frame, all with bees and 3 more frames of bees shaken in when making up a nuc. Remember to knock back again 1 week later to either the selected cell or another single charged open cell in your main colony. You can remove the old queen and recombine once the new queen is laying and you see capped worker brood. Splits – If you can’t find the queen or want to expand, we recommend Wally Shaw’s ‘Snelgrove 2’ as a great method of splitting a colony to control swarming. It’s a bit like a Pagden but less risk of swarms. Wally maintains it is 100% effective. As always keep an eye out for diseases of both brood and bees. Next month I’ll cover how we deal with the spring crop, but if you are near oil seed rape, don’t wait! Extract immediately when they start to cap frames or it will granulate. References.  ‘An Apiary Guide to Swarm Control’ Wally Shaw.   ‘Supering’ The Apiarist. David Evans. (online)