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  • Chocker Hive - Swarm Returned

  • Beginners forum, ask beekeeping related questions and get help from other experienced beekeepers. Please use the Search Feature please to avoid duplicated threads
Beginners forum, ask beekeeping related questions and get help from other experienced beekeepers. Please use the Search Feature please to avoid duplicated threads
 #6965  by Japey Edge
 10 May 2020, 12:46
Thanks for the responses. I have a feeling there may be two virgins in the colony as the swarm returned. The original queen and some brood was moved away into another nuc and have been doing just fine. This is a cast I'm dealing with. Hopefully they returned for good and the weather (or other reasons) will put them off trying again. Just hope it's out of their system. I have two queens on order for Tuesday/Wednesday.

Just to fill in the gaps:The situation:
Hive - 11 frame Abelo poly national brood box with QE and three supers on top. Top super nearly full, middle super half way, bottom super just frames of foundation. First super went on when they had 7 frames of brood.

- 25.04.2020 - 2019 queen clipped
- 02.05.2020 - colony attempted swarm. Found queen on floor. Put her and plenty of bees into 6 frame nuc. Gave two frames of brood and some stores. Went through original hive and took down all QCs we could find. Gave original colony frames with foundation to replace brood frames. Stores came from what I had in storage. Heard virgin queen piping.
- 09.05.2020 - original hive swarmed again. We saw where they went and when the bees settled down I set up a bait hive near them as they were far up in a tree. After we returned and had some lunch we carried out inspection and saw another spike in activity in the apiary. Hive was bearding like crazy. Assuming the swarm came back as it wasn't in the tree later on and the brood box was chocker during inspection despite the supers being around 50% or less capacity.
Took down more QCs. They all seemed small and unimpressive.

Even at 10pm there were bees clumped in the tunnel entrance floor.

Will have a look now to see if they have all gone inside.
 #6969  by stechad
 10 May 2020, 14:41
Jazz
I had a problem a few weeks back when I was sure mine would swarm as bb was chocka with bees, 6 frames all stages brood the rest full of stores and they refused to fill the super, there was a mated queen in residence but no queen cells.
As a precaution I did a demaree but gave a top entrance for the drones to exit.
bb + entrance
qe
super
super
qe
bb with normal entrance

I tried to leave only a couple of capped brood at bottom so that Q had room to lay again plus I only needed to check the top box for queen cells. At this point you have a few options as to where you go from there. My plans changed a few times and current plan is to split this hive and requeen when my new queens arrive. They made some queen cells which are in mini nucs to breed just as emergency back-ups.
 #6970  by AdamD
 10 May 2020, 15:43
Japey Edge wrote:
10 May 2020, 12:46
Thanks for the responses. I have a feeling there may be two virgins in the colony as the swarm returned. The original queen and some brood was moved away into another nuc and have been doing just fine. This is a cast I'm dealing with. Hopefully they returned for good and the weather (or other reasons) will put them off trying again. Just hope it's out of their system. I have two queens on order for Tuesday/Wednesday.

Just to fill in the gaps:The situation:
Hive - 11 frame Abelo poly national brood box with QE and three supers on top. Top super nearly full, middle super half way, bottom super just frames of foundation. First super went on when they had 7 frames of brood.

- 25.04.2020 - 2019 queen clipped. Is this because you saw queencells at that time?
- 02.05.2020 - colony attempted swarm. Found queen on floor. Put her and plenty of bees into 6 frame nuc. Gave two frames of brood and some stores. Went through original hive and took down all QCs we could find. Gave original colony frames with foundation to replace brood frames. Stores came from what I had in storage. Heard virgin queen piping. If you removed all the queencells on 2.5.20, were there opened queencells in the hive?
- 09.05.2020 - original hive swarmed again. We saw where they went and when the bees settled down I set up a bait hive near them as they were far up in a tree. After we returned and had some lunch we carried out inspection what did you find in respect to queencells?and saw another spike in activity in the apiary. Hive was bearding like crazy. Assuming the swarm came back as it wasn't in the tree later on and the brood box was chocker during inspection despite the supers being around 50% or less capacity.
Took down more QCs. They all seemed small and unimpressive.

Even at 10pm there were bees clumped in the tunnel entrance floor.

Will have a look now to see if they have all gone inside.
I have (twice only) seen mating swarms where a lot of bees leave and then come back - the queen has been laying a few of days later.
 #6972  by Japey Edge
 10 May 2020, 16:07
Hi Adam,

I didn't see QCs when I clipped the queen. I think this was the critical inspection where I should have looked in the nooks and crannies for hidden QCs. Whatever I missed on that occasion was my first (of a few) wrong step.
I didn't see any opened/emerged queen cells in the hive, but again I wasn't looking as close as I should have been - I suppose they could have closed up an emerged cell too as I have read on here previous.
When we returned to do the inspection yesterday (while the swarm was up a tree) we saw some pathetic-looking capped cells and took them down too. If they were still making queen cells what does that mean? What are the bees telling me?

I hope that was a mating swarm but it just looked like a typical swarm. It is exciting seeing new things and like Patrick has mentioned - I've had a lot of bee experiences over the past year. I am now ready for less bee experiences and a chilled out remainder of this season if that's OK please bees :lol:

I'll make up two nucs (not from this colony) with the new queens that are arriving next week. Will give this big colony some time to settle and new queen to lay or fail - then I'll requeen...
 #6973  by AdamD
 10 May 2020, 16:35
When we returned to do the inspection yesterday (while the swarm was up a tree) we saw some pathetic-looking capped cells and took them down too. If they were still making queen cells what does that mean? What are the bees telling me?
They will often keep producing queencells whilst they can and whilst there is no queen in the hive.