In this instructional video, beekeeping expert Laurence Edwards explains the benefits of clipping queen bees as a proactive swarm management technique. He showcases a real‑world scenario where a colony with a clipped queen has swarmed and formed a dense cluster beneath the hive overhang. Edwards walks through the step‑by‑step process of capturing the swarm with a nuc box, inspecting the original colony for swarm cells, consolidating those cells into a single queen‑rearing cell, and allowing the colony to requeen. He also discusses the underlying cause of the swarm—overcrowding from compressing the colony to draw honeycomb—and highlights how clipping queens serves as an “insurance policy” that makes swarm retrieval simple, preserves bee numbers, and creates easy splits for beekeepers. The video concludes with a brief tip on clipping queens without removing them from the frame, reinforcing the practical, hands‑on approach for hobbyists and commercial beekeepers alike.
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In this video, I'm going to talk to you again about why I clip my queens and show you why it's just the easiest swarm collection in the world when a clipped queen swarms. So you probably can't see it in the background because of how blurred out it is, but right there, there is a colony that has swarmed. I could see it as I was coming into this apiary. I knew the colony had swarmed, and there is a massive cluster of bees on the front of the hive underneath the overhang. It's a really simple one. A clipped queen in that colony has swarmed, I knew they were going to swarm because there were swarm cells last time I was here, and I was trying a little bit of an experiment with it. And they did, they swarmed, but they've not ended up in someone's chimney, they've not ended up in a tree hollow somewhere that I can't get them, they've not disappeared over the horizon. They've clustered up in front of the beehive, and now all I have to do is go over there with a nuc, lift them up with my hands, pop them in the nuc, and I can take them away. And I've made myself a really easy split. All I then need to do is go back into the colony, Check to see if there's any swarm cells in there, which there almost certainly will be. Knock them down to a single cell and let them requeen. Clipping your queens is the best insurance policy that you've got going. It doesn't mean that your bees don't swarm, but I would say 9 times out of 10, it means that you can retrieve that swarm really, really easily, which means that you maintain the number of bees within your apiary, within your business or operation. And it means that, okay, you might forego some honey production on that colony, But you've made a really easy split instead. Best insurance policy ever. I'll get my bee suit on and I'll show you just how easy it is to get that cluster of bees into a nuc.
So here's my swarm of bees. I quite like this Wenti design. You often find that they swarm and cluster up under that overhang there. I'm going to get inside, see if the queen's still there. The problem that you have with them clustering like this is that the queen will often just wander back into the colony. So we'll open them up, we'll have a look, see if we can find her, See if we can find her in the cluster, and we'll take just a really simple split and put it off into a nuc. These bees here need some space. There is a backstory, in case anyone's wondering what that backstory is. It's me just not beekeeping very well. But you know, I'll always show you my errors and my mistakes as well. But that there is effectively the easiest swarm you're ever going to catch, and I've not lost a single bee. So all I'm going to do with this colony here, I've got my nuc box, I've got drawn comb in there. Everything is nice and sealed up. I'm just going to start lifting off the bees in my hand and just placing them on there. Reason I'm doing it that way is it's going to be quite hard to shake these off, but also I just kind of like to see whether the queen is in there. When bees naturally cluster like this, all they're going to want to do is go down into these frames. They're not going to fly off everywhere. You'll get a couple of flyers, but hopefully we can see the queen, and then if we see the queen, we can just shake a few extra bees in and we've made a really nice easy split. So it wasn't obvious that the queen was on She's on the side there, and I can't really see her in this cluster, so I'm going to take it off now. I'm going to go and have a look in the colony, and then all we're going to do is shake off some bees with the mated queen, take that off, knock down all of the swarm cells, and then we've made a really easy split. We've not lost any of our resources. So this is what the colony is looking like. We've got it on a single brood box because we were really trying to compress them down to get them to draw our wild honeycomb in the jar. That is what's triggered the swarm. But luckily we've not lost any bees. I'll get inside now, pull out the frame, see if we can find the queen, see how many cells in there. I know there's going to be so many swarm cells in here, but it's an interesting experiment and it does show you what can go wrong when you're trying to cramp the bees down to get them to do things for you. So I've been through all of the frames and I cannot find the queen. That's kind of what I expected, and I think the queen is over there in that nuc now. Because I scooped up the cluster that was at the front of the hive, and that was what you would normally expect. Now this hive is so overpopulated, it's unreal. They're doing what I want them to do, but yeah, we have a little bit of an issue here. So we found lots of swarm cells, no queen, no eggs. They've run out of space. It's a really, really quick, easy manipulation for me. You've got to find all the swarm cells, shake all the bees off, knock them down to a single swarm cell. And then we will leave this colony here to requeen on its own. So if you want to clip your queens but you're not confident in picking them up, check out this video here where I show you a really simple, quick method to clip your queens without lifting them off the frame.
