Numbers

Sometimes we throw lots of numbers at beginners, but there are a few important ones to keep in mind.

The ones that are most important are those that relate to the queen. This is very important if you want to dabble in queen rearing, or just at a much simpler level manage swarm control.
These important numbers are 8 and 16.

The bees can swarm twice in a year. Some colonies may have swarmed in April and be ready for a second attempt if the weather hasn’t put them off!

8 days after an egg is laid in a queen cell it will be capped.
An adult queen will emerge at day 16.

Swarms don’t leave until a queen cell is capped.

So with regular inspections every 7 days you should get there before any are capped. Sometimes the weather will stop us inspecting and this year is no exception.
The persistent rain and dark skies have made the bees harder to get into. The constant threat of rain has dampened our spirits perhaps, but the bees are still working.

Day 16 is important, because that’s the day the new queen will emerge and if you missed an extra queen cell for whatever reason, then it is likely your hive will produce a cast swarm with half the bees leaving with this new unmated queen.

If you miss lots of queen cells and the colony had a lot of brood emerging then this will provide additional new queens with a workforce to take away too. This can go on until the hive is very depleted and gives you lots of cast swarms.
This is a real nuisance.

Have your kit ready for the type of swarm control you’re planning on doing. That means actually ready to put bees into.  Be prepared.

Swarm control can be at its simplest putting the queen into a nucleus box with sufficient brood and bees (no queen cells) and some stores; or more complicated like a Pagden or Snelgrove.

Make sure you only leave one open queen cell.
You must leave an open queen cell, else you risk ‘Schrödinger’s Queen Cell’ which risks you not having a queen inside.

But only leave one. Mark the frame with the queen cell carefully either with a drawing pin or your queen marking pen to indicate where on the frame it is and return it very carefully to the hive. Then take every other frame and check for queen cells. Check properly – you can at this point shake these other frames, just don’t crash about and bang into the frame with your chosen queen cell on. Destroy the other queen cells. All of them!

This careful inspection will make sure your swarm control works.

Diane Drinkwater, August