Laurence Edwards shows how to prevent swarming by adding a second brood box with foundation and clipping the queen early. Wild comb in the feeder signals the colony needs more space. Weekly checks on the new box, followed by supers and a demaree in May, keep bees from leaving.
Welcome back to episode 2. In this part of the video, I'm going to show you the next part of the manipulation where we try to keep that colony intact without it swarming throughout the whole course of the year. So I've done a couple of manipulations here today, and I've done it on every single beehive within this apiary. The weather has just gone absolutely bonkers. It's about 18 degrees here today. I've opened up a couple of the colonies and they are drawing lots of wild comb in the feeder. Which for me indicates that they're definitely out of space. I really don't want to be pulling frames out yet. I know I went in here and had a little bit of a check last time. But if you're following this video and you want to do absolutely everything you possibly can in order to reduce the chances of your bees swarming throughout the year, and you open up an upturned poly Ashforth feeder and they're drawing wild comb inside it, you need to take that as a little bit of a hint that they need extra space. So we've spoken about it on a previous video. You can put that box underneath. I've decided in this instance to put the box above only because of the weather that's coming this week. It's going to be 17-18 degrees for a whole week, and I know that there's good flows that are going to be going on here because of the forage that's available. So the next 2 things I've done with this colony here to try and mitigate that swarming impulse and just to keep it down throughout the whole of the season is I've taken this box here, I've put a brand new National Deep box on You can do any size box here, but the important thing is that you're making it into an additional brood box. This isn't just putting your supers on. We're not trying to maximize honey production here. We're trying to minimize swarming throughout the year. So my advice, definitely go double brood. I know this is some very odd brood and a half setup that I've got here, which is a National 14 by 12 box and a National Deep box. Makes it a lot easier if you keep the boxes the same. So if you're on a National Deep system, all I would suggest doing now is adding on an additional National Deep box. And my recommendation for you in this video here is to add the box full of foundation only. Don't use drawn comb because all drawn comb is going to do is it's going to increase the size of that colony at an exponential rate. And if they are able to go out and actually forage at this time of the year, you can take advantage of that flow to get some good foundation drawn out. It's going to limit the size of the colony, but that's what this series is all about. Also, while I've been here today, I've just quickly nipped in there. I found the queen. I've marked the queen, I've clipped the queen, and I would highly recommend if you want to minimize the chances of your bees swarming, going in early in the year if your queen is not already clipped and get in there and clip her. I know I said in previous videos you shouldn't be doing inspections yet, and what's your reason for going into your colony? I would say going into the colony when it's small at this point of the season, if you don't want them to swarm, to get in there and clip that queen, make sure she's okay, mark her up. That is definitely a valid reason to get into your colony. So that's it, that's the next update on this video. I've gone in, I've added an additional brood box full of foundation only, and I've gone in there, I've marked the queen, and I've clipped the queen. That's going to buy us a lot of time. I've still not gone in, I've not done an inspection on this colony yet. Absolutely no need. Hopefully what I've done is eliminated the risk of an early season swarm. Next episode though, we'll be coming back, checking to see how that colony is filling out this brood box. And then the plan forward will be to add supers on top of this double brood configuration, and we'll keep on coming back and monitoring it week in, week out. When we get to around early May, the point where bees will naturally swarm the most, I'm going to do a preemptive demerite on this colony, and I'm going to lift up this National deep box that I've put there. That's going to go at the top, and then it's going to be separated in the middle with some supers, and we'll cover all of that procedure on this series of videos. I hope your bees are doing well. I hope they're enjoying the weather. I'll see you on the next episode.
