Beekeeping and Occam’s Razor

Looking back on bee-related articles that I’ve written during the summer months, it’s no surprise to me that they all deal with similar themes: honey, queen bees, and swarms. This year is no different in that the work is the same as ever; we are marking new queens (blue this year), checking that the foraging bees are bringing in plenty of varied pollen for the ever-increasing amounts of brood, and dealing with swarms. We have been pro-active with our swarm control methods this season, especially with the colonies we are raising in Dadant hives – read on to find out about the bees in the Warré hives! It seems to us that there are more swarms around this year, or perhaps the general public is more aware of them, as we and other beekeepers have been contacted a lot more than usual with requests for help where unwanted bees are concerned. Sadly, we haven’t been called to any ‘easy’ swarm captures. Instead the calls are usually from homeowners who have bees in the chimney or under the eaves which makes removal very difficult. However, recently we did enjoy doing a good old-fashioned ‘cut-out’ of a nest that had been built between a window and the shutters, and we managed to not only find the queen but re-hive the colony back at base.

 

Warré hive about to go!

We make good use of the space we have here by having a ‘quarantine apiary’ where we place new colonies, away from our own hives, so that we can monitor their health. When we are sure the bees are healthy, we then move them away to break any location-imprinting, before passing them onto our students or integrating them into our apiary. One of these colonies was placed in a Warré hive and has been thriving so much that we added another box last week to provide extra space for the growing colony. As the bees had already swarmed (which is how we’d acquired them in the first place) we were relatively confident that they wouldn’t swarm again, so we didn’t carry out any swarm control on them. You guessed it….!

During a demonstration of a hive inspection on a small colony, one of the less-confident students commented “There’s much more noise than I expected” and I replied “Don’t worry, it’s not the bees roaring or growling, it’s just the noise their wings make”. Inwardly I thought “Hang on, she’s right, it IS a lot noisier than it should be” and turned around to see thousands of bees pouring out of the entrance to the Warré hive. Gulp – a swarm was in progress! The principle of Occam’s Razor fully illustrated: the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. If it sounds like a swarm of bees, looks like a swarm of bees, and there are a lot of bees flying in a group, it’s very likely to be a swam.  It was a warm day and I had no desire to go running around after our own bees, so I tried the ancient swarm-disruption method of ‘tanging’. Quite simply, this is bashing metal items together to make a noise that is supposed to confuse the bees while they are swarming, and this time it worked! The bees dropped onto the ground and then quickly went back into the hive. In truth they probably realised that the queen wasn’t with them and so returned to re-group, but at least I didn’t have to capture them. Later that day I carried out a full hive inspection and managed to ‘artificially’ swarm the colony, leaving us with two strong colonies.

Demarée swarm control

The Demarée method of swarm control involves using two brood boxes, and it worked so well that we now have three ‘double brood’ colonies, ie monster colonies of around 100,000 bees in each. The upside of this is that the honey supers are being filled much more quickly than usual as there are more foragers, and the greater number of bees means that there will be a good amount of winter stores and a strong colony to get through the winter. The downside is that the queen is also working harder than usual, laying around 1,500-2,000 eggs a day and so her life-span is foreshortened. We therefore need to be vigilant as to the health of these colonies as summer moves into autumn.

Stay safe in the heat!

Amanda