In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards (Laurence Edwards) shares his experience of losing a swarm early in the 2021 season and walks viewers through a step‑by‑step protocol for diagnosing a swarmed colony and limiting the damage. He first explains how to recognize a swarm by noting reduced bee numbers, heightened aggression, and the presence of multiple capped queen cells. He then differentiates a true swarm from a supersedure by using a practical threshold of queen‑cell count. Edwards shows how to inspect for a queen or eggs, and when none are found, he advises locating a single open, larva‑charged queen cell to preserve. He demonstrates the careful removal of that frame, the systematic destruction of all other queen cells across the hive, and the gentle re‑introduction of the preserved frame. Finally, he outlines how to re‑close the hive, add a feeder/crown board, and manage the reduced colony while awaiting a virgin queen to emerge, mature, and mate, emphasizing timing (8‑9 days to emergence, a few days to sexual maturity) and the importance of early‑season recovery. The video ends with a promise of a follow‑up update on the colony’s progress.
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Hi, I'm Lawrence Edison, Black Mans in Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. In this video, I'm going to show you what to do if your colony has swarmed. So believe it or not, April 26th today, and I've lost my first swarm of the 2021 season. Gutted! Hate losing swarms. Really frustrating, but you really have to try to not dwell on it too much. We're into damage. Limitation mode here, and that's what we're going to cover in this video. So I'm going to help you first identify if your colony has swarmed, take you through all the steps in terms of the colony management, and then I'm going to show you how to limit the damage that you could do to your colony and try and get them to recover to some reasonable numbers. Now the bees are angry at me. Always find this with colonies that have swarmed. Mated queen's gone away. They've got very delicate queen cells in there. Charged queen cells and capped queen cells, and they're angry. So if you open up your colony, first 2 things that you might notice with a colony that's swarmed: one, they're more angry than normal, and 2, there's hardly any bees left. Now luckily, it's very early in the season up here. These guys are definitely gonna recover, and I'll do a follow-up video showing how well they've recovered. But yeah, I'm gonna let you take a look inside this colony. I'm gonna show you how I know it's definitely swarmed. And I'm going to show you how to manage that colony and limit the damage to the colony. So get some smoke, give the colony a good smoke, get the ones around your face as well, on your hands. So like I said, the first thing I noticed when I opened this colony is there was nowhere near as many bees, probably only covering 6 or 7 frames when all of the rest of them up in this apiary are jam-packed full of bees. And then I found a single capped queen cell and I thought, oh, I might be lucky here. It might be a supersedure. And then the next frame I found about 7 capped queen cells. So I'm just going to show you some of those capped queen cells now. This is classic swarm cells. So supersedure, you might just have 1 or 2 of them. I don't buy into the philosophy that they're in a certain place on the frame. I go down to the number. So if it's 1 or 2, I tend to treat it as a supersedure. If there's anything more than say 5 or 6, it's definitely swarming. Obviously somewhere in the middle you might have a little bit of a gray area, but I tend to find unless it's just one or two, it is swarming and it's best to treat it that way. So this was the first frame that I pulled out and it looks decent frame, decent amount of brood. And then just hidden down there in the corner, I'll do a closeup now, there's a single capped queen cell. So this is the one I thought, oh, maybe it's supersedure. Obviously as soon as I see a queen cell, I'm thinking they're going to swarm. So I need to go and look at the rest of the frames. So I put this one down carefully because that might be the only cell that you've got to work with. And then we move on to the next step. So whenever I see a queen cell like that, the first 2 things that I'm looking for after that is hopefully I can find the queen. Hopefully it's not too late. Obviously you're looking for the queen, but the first thing I go and look for is I go and see if I can see eggs. If you can see eggs, chances are you might find the queen. I find if you can't find eggs and you've got capped queen cells, probably best to stop looking for that queen. She has gone over the horizon and she's taken half the bees with her. So they're the checks that I do. If you see a single swarm cell, go into the colony, see if you can find any more swarm cells. If you find a clutch of swarm cells, so anything over, say, 3 or 4, treat it as a swarm. If there's no eggs and there's no queen, you've definitely lost a swarm, and then you can move on to the next steps. The first step is to identify an open charged cell with a larva in it. That's the one you want to protect. A little bit counterintuitive, you might think you want to go for the nicest looking big capped one, but there might not be anything in it. If you go for an open one and leave them a single open charged cell with a larva in it, you've had the ID, you've looked in, you've said, right, there's a larva in there. When you take down all of the rest of the cells, the bees will focus on that one, they'll build it out, and then you know you've got a really good cell in order to create a virgin queen who can go out and get mated. Some people leave more than one cell. I don't bother. I always go down to one cell. That's just my technique. I think if you're going to do it where you can't find any open cells, then yeah, maybe leave a couple of the best capped cells. But if there are open cells that are available, I always bring it down to one open cell. So first thing you need to do is go in and identify that one open cell. So here's my open cell. I can see the larva in it. It's quite hard to zoom, but notice the bees and the way that they're tending to that cell. You can just see one pop their head in there, just checking that it's all right. The bees are really intent on making sure that cell's protected and they want to nourish it and feed it. That's the cell that you're looking for. That is a perfect cell, and there's no other cells on that frame as well, so it's even better because it means I don't have to start brushing bees off to kill the other cells. That's the cell that I'm going to keep, so I'm going to put that frame off to one side now. So once you've identified your frame with an open lava-charged cell on it, put that off to one side. Check all over the rest of the frame. Don't shake this frame. Make sure there's just one open charged cell with the lava in it, and that's the frame that you're going to use to requeen this colony. So be really careful with that one. Put it off to one side so you're not going to damage that Then what you need to do, go through every single frame, shake off all the bees, take down all of the cells, kill them, squish them. If you want to reuse them, go and put them in other colonies. They are ripe queen cells. You need to be very, very careful with them because these will have just been capped over. Do what you want with them. For the purposes of this manipulation, they are not needed. You just need one open cell. Right, so that looks really aggressive, but that's needed because you need to make sure that every single cell is destroyed. The reason for that is if you leave more than one, you've got the risk that they're going to send casts off. So what we've got here is a colony that's gone very, very small. Probably 60 or 70% of the bees have gone. So what you're left with is the remains. If you let Any more cells go, they're gonna throw casts out and you might be left with, say, 10% of the bees. Just makes it really, really difficult to build that colony back up again. So what we've done is we've gone through, we've identified there's no queen, there's no eggs. We found charged open cells and we found capped swarm cells. We've gone through, we've identified the one open larva charged cell that we're gonna keep, and then we put that to one side, shaken off all the other frames, killed every other single cell, So what we're left with is a colony of bees, no queen, no eggs, and one charged larva that they're going to turn into a queen. She's going to go out, hopefully get mated, hopefully going to save that colony. So just be really careful when you're putting that one frame back in. Don't squish it. That's the colony's only chance of survival now, so you need to be really careful with it, nice and gentle. And then you can close the colony back up. I can take away my highly ambitious supers. They're not going to be needing those anytime soon. I'm going to go straight on with my feeder, which acts as a crown board, store the supers upstairs, tighten everything back up, and we're good to go. Swarming is so annoying, and this is what you have to deal with in beekeeping. Try not to dwell on it though. Think that you've managed to keep a reasonable-sized colony there. It's happened early enough in the season that we can still target good late flows from this colony. So at the Heather Apiary, so I'm not overly fussed. Someone would have got themselves a really nice swarm of bees because these were super strong, really good quality bees as well. But yeah, can't dwell on it, just have to take decisive action to limit the damage, move forward into the season. So that's it for the video. I hope you enjoyed that one. Hopefully your bees aren't swarming this early as well. April the 26th, definitely getting into strong swarming season now, what with the nice settled weather. I'll do an update later on in the year. Think about the timetable for this one. You've probably got another 8 or 9 days before you're gonna get a virgin emerging. Few days for her to become sexually mature. Hopefully we still have nice weather there. She'll go out and mate, come back. So fast forward, say 4 weeks, I'll do an update on this colony. Hopefully we've got a nice F2 mated queen in this colony, 'cause it was an F1 queen that's gone off over the horizon. So I hope you enjoyed that one. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.
