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  • They've swarmed... HELP

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General Q&A, Bee chat and only Bee chat please
 #11361  by RDGBEES
 29 Jun 2021, 19:59
Hi all,

I'm really disappointed because I thought I was doing well with my splits and it was going to plan and then.....

My bees swarmed today luckily near to my apiary and I managed to collect them. The only issue is that I didn't have a spare hive so put them back in the original hive which I know is probably the wrong thing to do.

I carried out a split a couple of weeks ago and this is the hive with the new queen. I had a quick check of the frames before I collected the swarm and the queen had space to lay eggs.
I think the issue was the hive was extremely full with bees.

I've put a super on today to try and disperse them a bit. What else can I do?

Shall I replace a couple of frames with excess stores with foundation? (I will put the stores into my other hive I split).

Thanks in advance
 #11362  by NigelP
 29 Jun 2021, 21:20
Check the hive they swarmed from very thoroughly and carefully for other queen cells. They rarely swarm without some being present. KO any you find (there will be some somewhere) and then pray.
Perhaps think about acquiring more kit?
 #11363  by RDGBEES
 30 Jun 2021, 05:55
OK I will be going through the hive this morning and make sure I remove any queen cells.

With regards to new kit this is my first year and has already cost me a small fortune. I don't think the Mrs will give me any more pocket money to buy more at the moment 😁
NigelP wrote:Check the hive they swarmed from very thoroughly and carefully for other queen cells. They rarely swarm without some being present. KO any you find (there will be some somewhere) and then pray.
Perhaps think about acquiring more kit?
 #11364  by AdamD
 30 Jun 2021, 09:58
Adding on to Nigels post, you can put a queen excluder under the brood box for a couple of days to ensure they don't go.
Note that once a new queen has started to lay there would usually be no possibility of old queencells being present. However bees will sometimes have queencups ready until the new queen is laying; maybe an egg got into one of these and was treated as a potential queen.
It is very rare for this-years-queen to swarm due to congestion however giving them space at this time of year will do them no harm at all. As an option (there are always lots of options in beekeeping!), assuming your two hives are close together, is that you could move the just-swarmed hive to the other side of the other one. This will bleed off the flying bees to the hive with the old queen and reduce any swarming urge.

Very occasionally bees will decide that their new queen is defective and will continue to produce queencells as they want to replace her.

Best of luck; Let us know how you get on!