In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards walks through a beekeeping colony that exhibits numerous open (charged) and capped swarm cells, illustrating why he clips every mated queen he works with. He explains that a clipped queen prevents the colony from successfully swarming because the bees cannot fly the queen out, even when environmental conditions (sunny day, impending rain) would normally trigger a swarm. Edwards inspects the brood frames, identifies and opens several queen cells, and locates the clipped mated Buckfast queen, which he cages for safety. He argues that clipping the queen buys time—allowing the beekeeper to intervene before a swarm occurs and preserving the colony’s workforce. To manage the imminent swarm risk, he proposes a targeted split: remove the clipped queen with one or two frames, knock down all but one open queen cell, and give the remaining bees extra space. This mimics the perception of a swarm without losing the majority of bees. He notes the method isn’t foolproof but works well in practice, and references a pre‑emptive Demerara split as an alternative early‑season strategy.
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This colony here is the perfect example of why I clip every single one of my mated queens. So I've been going through this apiary here doing my swarm checks, and you know what, I just get used to my queens being clipped now. As soon as I went into the brood box here, I knew something was going wrong. I pulled out a couple of frames and I found open charged queen cells. Obviously, when you're finding open charged queen cells, you're thinking, right, the bees are about to swarm, I need to find my queen. So going through the frames trying to find the queen, And then I noticed a number of capped swarm cells as well. Now, on a normal day like today, it's about 3 PM in the afternoon, beautiful sunny Saturday. If you hadn't clipped your queen and you were going through your colonies and you found open charged swarm cells and then you found a capped swarm cell, considering it's a beautiful sunny day, it's due to rain tomorrow as well, and it's 3 o'clock in the afternoon, there is no way that there would be this many bees in this colony here. Not a single chance because they would take that opportunity. The weather's nice, they've capped their queen cells, the colony wants to swarm, they would have gone. 100% they would have gone. But the beauty of having a clipped queen is that they often just don't even bother trying to get out. So you see sometimes with a clipped queen that you'll find the swarm underneath, underneath the open mesh floor, but I find a lot of the time they don't even bother leaving anymore. They realize they can't fly. So they're just waiting for those queens to emerge from the capped swarm cells, and then the swarm will still leave, and it will leave with that first virgin and leave the mated queen behind. So even if you take that as a kind of worst-case scenario, and I know they can cast themselves pretty much to nothing, but if you get in there and take down the swarm cells after you lose that first prime swarm that goes with the virgin, then it's really not the end of the world. As long as the queen's not old, then you can build that back up really quick with a mated queen in there. So that's the first reason that I like it, is that if you don't do any inspections at all, then you're kind of going to remain with at least a decent amount of bees, and you're going to remain with a mated queen so you can get back on track. But even better than that, you can just get in there before they go and swarm. So what I've got in here, and I'll show you everything, I've got a mated queen. She is clipped F1 2021 marked white Buckfast queen. I've got loads of open charge Swarm cells, absolutely tons of them. I've got capped swarm cells as well, and none of the bees have left my hive. How good is that? I love clipping queens for that very reason, in that makes my life easier and I don't lose my precious resources. So let's go through this colony now. I'll show you why I think they're swarming, show you why I know they're swarming, take a look at some of those open swarm cells, take a look at the capped ones as well, see if we can find the queen who I just see knocking around in here. And then I'll tell you what I'm going to do with this colony going forward. Right, so first off, here are my charged swarm cells. Always going to be a little bit difficult to zoom in and see them, but you can see them there. 3 or 4 charged swarm cells, nice new white wax, dead giveaway. And if you can see inside, I'll see if I can zoom in a bit, but they are charged. They've got a larva, they've got royal jelly in them. They are viable swarm cells. And just as I was pulling this one out, I damaged it a little bit. But as you can see, this cell here is completely capped over. A little bit damaged because it was kind of protruding on the edge. I'm going to open it up now and show you. There is a larva in there. You can see that it's sealed. That means that the bees should no longer be here, but we've kept them here because we've clipped that queen. So you can see in there quite a bit more than a larva actually. That is Very mature queen cell. You can see even the eyes are forming. That's about 2 or 3 days away from emerging. So what would have happened there is they would have emerged with this virgin here. I've got here in time though. It means that you can extend that inspection time out from 7 days over to about 10 days, and luckily I've caught this one just in time. So there you can see I've found my queen, and as you can see, she is clipped. So I'm just going to get her, put her under this cage, Make sure she can't get away, really important, otherwise you're in big trouble. But I found my queen, that means they're definitely not going to swarm today. I'll put this frame off to one side now. Right, so what am I going to do with this colony then? I'm a strong believer that once your colony gets into a situation like this, they're going to swarm. No way that you can do anything here. You can't just go through, take down all of the cells, let the queen go back on. They will swarm, and they will swarm before they probably even create new cells. Definitely they won't wait until the next batch of cells is capped. So what am I going to do? I think the only real thing you can do here is make a split, but the benefit of having that mated queen clipped means that you can judge how big the splits are. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take away like a 1 or 2 frame split with the mated queen, knock down every single cell. I'm going to go through, shake off every single one except one open charged cell, and And at the same time as I'll give this colony a little bit of extra space as well. Doing all of those 3 things means that the colony kind of thinks they've swarmed because there's no longer a queen there. You've given them a little bit of extra space, and you've also minimized the risk of them sending out casts because you've knocked all of those cells back down to one. Is it foolproof? Does it work every time? Definitely not. This is bees, they do what they want. That's what I would do though in this situation here. Take out the mated queen, That's your valuable asset here. Knock down all the queen cells, leave one open charged queen cell, come back in a few weeks, and hopefully they've requeened from that cell and you've kept the vast majority of your bees in here. I won't show you how to do that on this video. We like to do a preemptive Demerara split way before the bees even think about starting to do charged swarm cells. If you want to know how to do that, check out this video here for a really detailed instruction on how to stop your bees swarming before they even think about it.
