Mitigating a swarm

Blog number 5 - 5th May 2025

Today, Anthony, student beekeeper Jacqui and I found that the spring build up in the observation hive colony has reached its peak. We found several queen cells, containing a pool of royal jelly with a larva curled on top, on several frames. This is the sign that the colony is getting ready to swarm.

During the past couple of weeks, the young bees in the colony will have been feeding lots of food to Bee-Yonce, to encourage her to lay a series of eggs. They will have chosen the ones from which they would raise a replacement queen, if she left in a swarm. After all that food Bee-Yonce would be too heavy to fly with the swarm. So, they put her through a boot camp regime, stop feeding her and push her around on the comb, so that she loses weight.

We decided to split the colony, to manage their preparations and avoid losing the slimmed down Bee-Yonce and half the colony in a swarm. We put the frame she was on into a nuc box, with stores and some other frames of comb for her to continue laying and shook in some young bees to look after the brood.

We found all the other queen cells on the frames in the hive and saved the best placed open cell, where we could see we had a good pool of royal jelly with a healthy larva curled on top. We knocked back all the others. If that queen cell gets damaged in transit, or the bees decide not to use it for any reason, we know we have eggs on frames in the hive and they can be used to raise emergency replacement queen cells.

On Sunday 11 May, I will call back with another team member to check whether the bees have decided to stick with the original queen cell or have raised other cells from the eggs on the frames. We will choose the best queen cell left and knock back all others. When this is done, we need to leave the colony alone for at least 21 days, to allow time for a new queen to emerge, mate and start laying eggs. If the weather is unsettled, it may take a further week.

I took the nuc with Bee-Yonce and the young nurse bees back to our association apiary today and will add a frame of sealed brood from another colony later in the week.

Bee-yonce came back to Cliffe Castle on 7 April and returned to the apiary on 5 May. The weather this year is much more favourable for the bees (at least so far) than last year. If things remain settled, we will have a replacement for Bee-Yonce in the next month and this will be a blue queen.

Keep a look out for news about a Name the Queen competition 2025!