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General Q&A, Bee chat and only Bee chat please
 #12756  by AdamD
 31 May 2022, 14:10
I've had two double brood colonies with swarm cells - so far.
With one, the queen was present along with some selaed swarm cells, so I left her in a third brood box at the bottom of the stack with a queen excluder under the brood box for a few days, with the rest demareed above, but with a top entrance so the drones could leave. I was able to move some of the frames down and re-distributed everything until I had one brood box above and the queen in the lower box on the hive floor. I have since put the demareed brood box down below the queenright one. Hopefully with room now (the influx of OSR caught me out and they were rammed), they will not produce queencells again this year.
For the second colony, they happened to swarm whilst I was there and I saw a little cluster of bees around the clipped queen on the grass.
I did the same thing - putting her back, for now, in a new lower brood box with a queen excluder under. This time I have kept a brood box above the supers with a queencell from a better colony inside so hopefully she will mate via the top entrance and I can then manipulate the stack so eventually the new queen takes over.