New for Old

Spring is a time of rebirth, renewal, and regrowth in Nature, and this of course includes the honeybee.
Having survived the winter, bee colonies are now increasing in size, with queens typically ramping-up their laying rate to 1500-2000 eggs a day. At this time of year, some of these will be drones, the males produced to mate with virgin queens from other colonies. It’s also the beginning of the swarm season, when colonies make the decision to split with up to 40% of the bees plus the queen flying out to a new home.

April was an extremely busy month; the weather was perfect, and forage for pollinating insects was plentiful, so we received several calls to collect swarms.

We were quite smug about having carried out swarm control work on our own colonies (see our previous blog about the Demaree method), so at least they weren’t causing problems to other home owners! A couple were relatively easy to collect – a snip of the branch/twig that the bees were clustered around, into a cardboard box, then they were wrapped up, pudding-style, in a large sheet and brought back to 13 Bees where they were re-homed in a hive. Others were a little more tricky, having clustered under the eaves of a house, necessitating a shimmy up ladders to remove them.

We provide some food (syrup or a banana) to all the swarms we re-home as they have nothing, and are sometimes just a few thousand bees, so the food is part-bribe and part-aid to get them to stay and to start building comb. We leave them alone for a few days and then check that they have settled in and that the queen is present and laying. We also expect to see supersedure queen cells as the swarmed queen will soon be replaced by the colony. Swarming is an exhausting process!

Once the supersedure queen cell is sealed we have an anxious time waiting for the virgin queen to hatch, and return from a mating flight – it can be a good couple of weeks until we see any new eggs. At this point all we can do is remind ourselves to be patient! Easier said than done and if it's happened to you, you know exactly what we mean. 

Let us know if you've seen any swarms this year :-)