Laurence Edwards shows how to prevent swarming by giving bees space and timing. He added a new brood box to let the colony expand, clipped the queen to make her easier to retrieve if they swarm anyway, and delays the queen excluder until late June so she can lay freely. Space management stops bees from hitting the critical mass that triggers swarming.
We're onto episode 3. We're trying to keep this colony from swarming, and we're doing absolutely everything we can in order to make sure the colony doesn't swarm. In the previous video, we put an additional brood box underneath with foundation on to get the bees to draw it out, give them something to do, make sure they're using up all of their stores and turning it into new drawn combs. We went in there as well and we clipped that queen. And for me, that's so important because it means that if she does swarm, then you've got a chance of retrieving that swarm. And then what we're going to go in there today and do is we're going to go and have a look at the colony, see how that colony's getting on. And we're just going to make sure that the colony still has sufficient space. I want to make sure that I'm always ahead of the game with space because as soon as you reach that limit, critical mass within the hive and the bees say there's no more space in here, that's generally the easiest way to trigger a swarm. Also, what I'm going to do with this colony this year is I'm not going to use a queen excluder until we get into kind of like the middle of June, end of June, because I just don't want to give the queen any excuse for limiting and restricting that brood area down. And as I said before, my modus operandi for this colony here is for them to not swarm. I probably will end up with quite a lot of honey as well, but it'll mean that I'm restricted to only a summer crop, or that I'm restricted to only harvesting in the summer, but it'll be a mixture of a spring and summer crop. I'm really excited to see how they're getting on. Let's get inside, see how the colony's getting on. So this is what the colony's looking like. Got the feeder on, but I'm not feeding them. That's just acting as a crown board. I've got a wooden brood box on there. That's the one we added last time, just with foundation on. Be really interesting to see what the bees have made of that, if they've drawn it out, if they put brood up there. And then we've got a 14 by 12 brood box underneath. No queen excluder partitioning anything off, so the queen's got free rein all over that hive. Right, so I've massively overestimated the progress of this colony here. Some of the other hives in this apiary have moved up into this box already. This one here is lacking behind a little bit, which for me, for this video, works very, very well. Much less likely to swarm early on in the season. So they've not touched the additional brood box that's here. However, the next 2 weeks look fantastic, and I know that the bees will be coming in, Bringing in nectar, boosting things up in here. So I've not got a problem. I'm going to take that box off now. I'll show you what they're looking like in the brood box. I'll pull out a couple of frames. I'll show you that clipped queen, and then we'll fast forward a couple of weeks and see how the bees are getting on. So here's my brood box. They've definitely expanded since I've looked into them last time, but they're trying to keep all of that downstairs in the original brood area, which is strange because a lot of the other colonies up here, they're not doing that. They're moving up very quickly. This one here, maybe just a little bit of a smaller colony, taking a little bit of time to get going. Looking nice and healthy though, good healthy bees, good healthy cluster. I'll pull out a couple of frames, see if we can find that clipped queen, have a look at what the brood's looking like, and then we'll close them back up, leave them to it. So there's my queen. You can see I've clipped that queen, I've marked her. She's a white 2021 queen, nice young queen, which means hopefully she's not going to swarm this year. I do find the younger the queen, the less likely they are to swarm. We're doing everything we possibly can to try and mitigate that swarm risk. So don't try all of this with like a 3 or 4-year-old queen. Go with last year's queen, it's going to make it a lot easier. Take a look at that brood though. She may be a little bit slow to get going, this one may have started out a little bit smaller, but what a fantastic brood pattern. Bit cold here today, so I'm not going to keep them open for too long. Gone through, there's about 6 or 7 frames of brood looking very similar to this one here. I'll close them back up. Next time we'll see just how much they've expanded. Just goes to show, in beekeeping you can never second-guess anything. I thought without a doubt they were going to be up in that super, but I'm pretty confident within a couple of weeks they're going to have expanded and they're going to be well and truly up in that super and laying brood up there as well.
