In this instructional video, beekeeper Laurence Edwards demonstrates a checkerboarding swarm‑control technique, presenting it as an experimental method to prevent swarming for an entire season. He explains the background of the method from the book by J. White, A. Hunt, and G. Bannister, outlines the necessary preparations (leaving a honey super with capped stores, gathering drawn comb or foundation), and walks through the step‑by‑step construction of two checkerboarded boxes by alternating frames of capped honey with empty drawn comb or foundation. Edwards stresses that queen excluders must not be used when the boxes are placed on top of the brood box, selects a strong colony for the trial, and describes how the setup will be left untouched for the rest of the year to monitor whether swarming is prevented. He frames the whole process as a first‑of‑its‑kind experiment, invites viewer comments, and references a related pre‑emptive Demeray split video for additional swarm‑control methods.
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In this video, I'm going to show you a swarm management technique that's guaranteed to make you lose no swarms throughout the season. Okay, okay, it's definitely not guaranteed. In fact, I've never done it before, and this is a complete experiment. I do apologize for misleading anyone. However, how good would it be if it was guaranteed? I've been speaking to people who wrote this book about checkerboarding, And they say for years they have never lost any swarms. In this video, I'm gonna show you how to set up your checkerboarding swarm control. How strange is that? Doing it in the middle of January. Absolutely bonkers, but I love it. I love trying different things. How on earth do you know if something works unless you have a go and try it for yourself? So this is gonna be the first video in probably 3 or 4 videos over the course of this season. We're gonna follow one of these colonies here. We're gonna do the checkerboarding manipulation here. You only need to do it once, and then we're just going to leave that colony throughout the whole of the season, see how tall we can get it, see how long we can keep the bees there without them swarming, and just give you an indication of whether or not it's a guaranteed swarm control technique. But come on, we know nothing is guaranteed in beekeeping. Right, in classic no-nonsense beekeeping style, I got to the other apiary and I didn't have all my kit. So I've come back to my base apiary here, and now I'm going to show you how to set up the checkerboarding boxes. So I've never done this before. This is an experiment. Do you think it's going to work? Stick it in the comments below. I'm naturally curious. That's all I'm going to say. I'm going with the Swarm Management Checkerboarding book written by J. White, A. Hunt, and G. Bannister. John's the guy that I'm getting all of my details off though. So I'm going to follow this book to the letter. And it is the simplest manipulation in the world. I want this to work so much. It's going to make my life so easy. There are things you need to do though to prepare yourself in order to do this. So if you're going to do this in 2022, you need to have access to some drawn and filled capped stores. Can't do it without capped stores. So what you really need to do is watch me do it this year. If it's something you're interested in doing, you need to make that decision around honey harvest time, August and September, and you need to leave at least one honey super on your colony, on every single colony that you're going to checkerboard. And then that gives you the ability to do the checkerboarding the next year. So I'm going to set everything up Outside the hive, and then we'll go over to a hive and we'll put it on. Now in the book here, it says that you're supposed to do the checkerboarding on your supers. Now for me, I don't really use supers anymore. Obviously I've still got some legacy supers, but I like to use national deeps. But a super doesn't really denote the size of the box, just means it's above the queen excluder. So you can do it with national deeps, you can do it with Langstroth medium deeps, Dadants, whatever you want. Doesn't make a difference what size frame or what size box you use. The only important thing is that you need to checkerboard those frames and they need to be offset against each other. So these are the 2 boxes that I'm going to do it with here. And put that box over to one side for the time being. That is a box full of capped or mostly capped stores. And in this box here, I've got a box of drawn comb. Now you can do this with wax foundation as well. John says it doesn't make a massive difference either way. You need to intersperse frames of capped stores With frames of either foundation or empty drawn comb. I don't have any foundation made up. I've got loads of drawn comb made up though, so I'm going to do it with drawn comb. And then it's the simplest thing in the world. Such an easy, simple technique. One frame of drawn comb, one frame of stores. You can even mix it up with empty drawn comb and foundation. What's important is that you're interspersing those frames of capped stores. I know I'm kind of saying it like I know what's going on here. Not a clue. I have no experience of this, but John has been very adamant on all of this and it's detailed in his book, which is a really good book. I'm just following what John says and I hope that it's going to work. So here are my frames. These are the empty ones and I've tried to go for the ones that have got a bit of foundation. So that one there is not even really fully drawn out. I'm going to start that off on that side there. So there we go, nice frame of stores, mostly capped but big heavy frame. I'm going to pop that in there. And then I'm just going to work my way all the way along, one frame of foundation or empty drawn comb, and then one frame of capped stores. So there you go, that's my first box done. You can see there, frame of capped stores next to a frame of empty drawn comb, and then a frame of capped stores, empty drawn comb. Got a couple of DM1s in there with some spacers as well, but as long as everything's evenly spaced, that should work. So on this one, I started on this end with a drawn comb or foundation. So then take your next box. If you're using shallows, do it with shallows. If you're using deeps, do it with deeps. Same orientation like that. And then we started this end on the bottom box with a piece of foundation or drawn comb. So that's why you don't jam your frame lugs in like that. Really, really tight here. I just wanted to get that 11th one in. and I broke the frame lug. Really annoying. You don't get that with Langstroth. We'll chuck that away. But there we go, we're fully set up. So we've got 2 boxes that can be shallow or deep, and they're interspersed evenly between drawn-out foundation, drawn comb, and capped stores. So this is what the book says. If you want to set this up for 2023, you leave that super on. The yellow bars there indicate that the frames have got capped stores. What I've done is I've mimicked that, and I've ended up with this over here. So a box at the top, a box at the bottom, Interspersing empty frames that can be foundation or drawn comb with capped honey, and I'm going to put them on top of a big brood box now. And then the final thing to say before I go and put my bee suit on is that you cannot use queen excluders with this approach when you're putting your checkerboarded boxes on top. You can use queen excluders later on in the year. However, Jon recommends that you just don't use queen excluders. At least I think that's what you said, Jon. So I'm just going to get rid of the queen excluders. And I'm gonna run these without queen excluders for the rest of the year. Right, this is the colony here that I've chosen to do my checkerboarding split on. I'll tell you the reasons why. Firstly, it's next to my fake Flow Hive, so it's easy for you to remember where it is. Secondly, I've looked at the colony there. I said I wanted a nice heavy beehive so that I didn't have to mess around with fondant. I looked at this one here and I thought, okay, it's dead. I won't use that one. I'll just check underneath though, 'cause if I've got a nice healthy cluster underneath, then this is the one that I want to use. Take a look at that cluster underneath there. This is the perfect candidate for checkerboarding. Big, strong cluster, and it's nice and low down in the system already. Gives me plenty of time for them to work through those stores and hopefully not swarm when it comes to spring. So how simple is this? All you need to do, make sure you've not got a queen excluder there, go and take your checkerboarded boxes, put them on the top. How simple was that? But if you read further through into the book, I thought what you had to do every time you add a super onto this box now, you needed to go and put another checkerboarded super on. But no, you definitely don't need to do that. You can put a full box of foundation on, you can put a full box of drawn-out combs on. That is it in terms of the checkerboarding. Hopefully I'm not going to have to do another single inspection on that colony all the way through the year. They're not going to swarm. I'm going to end up with 200 pounds of honey. It's going to be the most fantastic year. If you want to see a method of swarm control that I can definitely vouch for, check out this video here which shows you a pre-emptive Demeray split.
