These Bees Swarmed Then Made 211 Jars of Honey!
In this instructional video, the beekeeper walks through the full recovery of a colony that unexpectedly swarmed. He first explains how he identified the swarm by observing swarm cells and the queen’s absence, then enters damage‑limitation mode by removing every swarm cell except one (or the best capped cell) and preserving a single virgin queen. After the virgin emerges, he re‑introduces her to the colony and returns four weeks later to verify successful mating by locating eggs, capped brood, and an F2 Buckfast queen, which he marks with pink paint. The beekeeper then inspects the supers, selects fully capped honey frames for extraction while leaving nectar‑filled or foundation frames for the bees, and documents the honey harvest. Finally, he prepares the colony for winter: he removes all supers, compresses the bees into a single brood box, installs a poly‑asphalt feeder, feeds 1:1 sugar syrup, applies Apivar varroa strips, and ensures the colony can overwinter safely. Throughout, he emphasizes that a swarm is not the end of the world and that with proper cell management, queen handling, and winter preparation the colony can bounce back and produce a large honey crop.
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This colony of bees here swarmed unexpectedly. In this video, I'm going to tell you how they bounced right back. So this huge colony here, 7 supers, 1 brood box, no queen excluder. The queen has gone wild. I have never in my life seen so many swarm cells. They are dotted around the entire hive. The swarm has left. I watched them leave. I can see them in the tree, so I know they've definitely swarmed. And we have got multiple capped swarm cells in here. So we are into damage limitation mode. In this video, we'll cover everything. How do I know that they swarmed? What to do next to limit that damage? And then how do we get this colony back on track? So believe it or not, this isn't the end of the world here. If you can go and collect that swarm, bump it into a nuc box, overwinter it, sell it to someone next year as a really good strong overwintered colony, it's not a swarm, it's just one of your colonies. You go and collect it, you don't need to treat it in the same way as a swarm. Then that part of the split sort Sorts itself out. It's got a queen in it. And then this part of the split here is super simple to fix. So I'll cut to the chase. All I'm going to do is take down every single queen cell that is there, barring one. I'm just going to leave one open swarm cell. If there's none that are open, I'll choose the best capped swarm cell. So let's jump in, take a look, see where the colony is, and see if we can get it back on track. So as I said before, this hive here is a bit all over the place. The brood isn't just confined to the brood box. The brood is everywhere. This top box here, nothing in it. All I've got is some bees and they're drawing out the frames. You can see it's still got a few frames of foundation in there, so I'm giving them enough space. They've not swarmed due to lack of space. These guys just wanted to go, and that is unfortunately what beekeeping is all about. But if I bring down this new box here and show you some of the frames, you will see that the bees left behind a really good amount of honey. Lots and lots of honey here has been left. And then if I move down again to a next box, you'll start to see that we've got a little bit of brood creeping in. So as I said the video before, we didn't have a queen excluder. This is the remnants from this colony. But let's move over here because what we see Over here is craziness. Check out some of these frames of brood. Absolutely sensational. We have got some brilliant frames of brood. A very, very good quality queen here. And in that box there, we've just got honey going up to the side. So let me find you some swarm cells. But look at this. As I start to pull these frames out here, you're going to start seeing swarm cells. There we go. There's the first one. And then over there, we've got a nice open cell. That's probably going to be the one that I'll go for there. A nice open one is always good. So I've got my bucket full of just bits of wax and stuff. All of the swarm cells that I take off, I'm just going to chuck in here. Don't go chucking them behind you, it is a massive hygiene risk. So all I'm doing is just going through and taking down every single swarm cell like that, popping it off into the bucket. So do it on both sides, you can't miss them. Take down anything that you think looks like a swarm cell. So then just a final little shake like that, just to double check. And that is the first frame done. I need to do that now to about another 60 frames in this colony. So we'll fast forward. I'll go through every single one. So you can see how easy it is to miss them. I've just been running through this bottom brood box and look, they've tucked one away right in this corner here. Don't think they're all going to be on the frames when there's 30. They have just put a single one here. And believe it or not, we have got a live virgin ready to come out. So let me flip the cameras around and I'll show you exactly what's going on here. So this makes it so much easier. I've got a virgin ready to emerge on this frame here. I'm going to go and put this somewhere really safe and then I'm going to take down every other single swarm cell and then I've got my queen that is ready to emerge. So that's all of the swarm cells in my bucket. I'm going to get that lid on so the bees don't start robbing it. I have taken down every single queen cell in this colony. So now all we've got is brood, some open larva, and one virgin queen that is ready to emerge. Well, she's properly gone and ruined my video there. She's emerged. In that time, I knew I should have filmed it before. But anyway, I've got my virgin, which is exactly what I need. So you can see one virgin F2 Buckfast queen because it's come from an F1 mother. You can still see though very orange. Let's zoom in, see how she's looking. Getting a little feed there, so she's very very happy, and we have got everything we need. So I've taken the virgin queen. She's in my hand there. You can see. Just going to let her go into the colony. Colony is now queen right again. They think they've got a queen. She's not mated. She could be useless. But what we're going to do is we're going to come back in 4 weeks and we're going to see how this colony is getting on. I'm crossing my fingers. I'll see you soon, but stay tuned because we're doing it all in one video. So we're back at this colony here which swarmed about 4 weeks ago, and I'm coming in to see if the virgin queen that was left behind has successfully mated. Fingers crossed all is good. It's a really big strong colony. There are lots of bees inside. Very excited to see what is going on. So very warm, very active, but let's get some smoke in there. Big strong colony, so you need a decent amount of smoke. So you can see on there, look at all those drones hanging out. And this is what happens when you have lots of space in the beehive. The drones are probably not wanted that much anymore, getting towards the mid back end of July and the season's finishing very quickly, but they are clustering up in a super. So this box here, loads of honey. Look at that, bees working really well, collecting all of that nectar. And you can see there, the bees are really capping that over well. A wonderful frame of honey. So what you can see there, that is the swarm cell where our virgin Emerged. Just a tiny little sign of it left. Sometimes they completely take that down. Before this inspection, there was no queen excluder in this beehive at all. The queen was in there. I didn't know where she was. I found the queen, placed her downstairs in this brood box, put a queen excluder there so she cannot go up. All of the brood up in the supers now will emerge. The bees will backfill it with nectar. We're back to that normal setup in beekeeping. The queen downstairs in the brood box, queen excluder, and supers above. I'll give it a few more weeks and we'll come back, and hopefully this queen will be mated and the bees will be well on the way to a Bumper honey truck. So this colony of bees swarmed. The queen left, took about 50% of the bees, but left behind multiple swarm cells. I went in, knocked down every single one except one, and I've left the bees for about five weeks now. Today I'm going back inside. We're going to see how they are. Hopefully the bees have requeened themselves, and hopefully they're all set for winter. So we've got five supers set up on the colony. I have no idea if it's still going to be full of bees. The most important thing for me is do we have a queen downstairs, and can this colony get? Through to the winter. Looking at the entrance, I think it looks pretty good. We've definitely still got bees in here, but there is something a little bit strange going on on the sides of the beehive. So I am intrigued to get in and see what is going on inside. So we've got bees coming out the top. I'm just going to get all of these supers off over here because the important bit that I want to show you is down by the queen excluder. Very positive that we're seeing so many bees up in these supers. But the problem that we had with this beehive here is that I put the queen excluder in, And I forgot to put a top entrance to let the drones out. This board here 10 minutes ago was full to the brim with dead drones. And I have done a separate video showing you exactly what went wrong. So if you're interested in watching that video, I'll stick it up in the top left-hand corner. But what we need to do is ensure that this colony here is back on track. Let's get inside, see if we can see a queen, see if we can see eggs, see if we can see worker brood. Then we'll take a look through the supers, condense it down, get it ready for winter. And then and only then, hopefully we are back on track and ready for 2026. So we can see once we've taken that queen excluder off, the brood box here is full. And I can tell just from looking at this colony that we are definitely going to have a queen and we're going to have capped worker brood, just from the way that they have purpose, from the way that they're not jumping up, from the way that they look like they're clustering around a nest. But I have been proven wrong before. Let's get some frames out and see what is inside. So I'm going to go straight in with the middle frame there. I can't even see what's on the frame trying to get that out perfectly, but oh, There we go. Capped worker brood. Exactly what I wanted to see. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to shake off this frame so I can give you a better shot of that. So you can see there a really nice capped worker brood pattern, pearly white larva, a very successful mating from this queen. So you can see really good pattern, eggs developing into larva, pearly white larva, and then developing into capped worker brood, which indicates a successful mating. So we've identified eggs, we've identified brood. I want to find this queen. I want to see what she looks like. I want to mark her. We'll take a look at a bit more of that brood, but then we'll get upstairs in the supers and see if we've got a good honey harvest. 10 minutes to find that queen, but I finally found her. An F2 Buckfast queen. I had to shake all of the bees off there just to be able to find the queen, but she is here. So you can see my queen there. She really does stand out. A very orange queen indeed. She is an F2 Buckfast, the daughter of an F1 Buckfast. And the first thing that I'm going to do is get a pink mark on her back because that is the best color to be able to see these queens. So I'm going to mark this queen. If you're doing this at home, make sure you get that pen, And pump out any excess paint. Give the pen a good shake. Pump out some more paint. You need to make sure the paint is well mixed and you need to make sure the tip is not flooded or you will just flood the queen and you will kill her. So the way that I like to catch my queen, I'll just tap her down like that. Little pink spot on her back. Let her go and she is happy. So I've got the queen on my frame and I'm going to place her into the colony. That is one job done. But do not go anywhere because look, at the amount of bees that we've got on these frames. And let me shake some of them off like that and show you what is underneath. So that one there is a frame of eggs. What we're looking for here is copious amounts of brood. And look at the brood pattern of that queen there. So look at this brood nest here. There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever we have a queen. She's mated well. A prolific colony that's getting ready for winter. There's honey upstairs in the supers. What we need to do is take the honey out of the supers, compress the colony down, and call it a day for the As I'm going through these boxes here, there's lots and lots of nice frames of honey in there. Look at that one, perfectly ready for extraction. And how do I know that? I know it because the frame is nearly fully capped. If you're seeing your frames like this, they are well and truly ready for extraction. You do not need to test the moisture content. So what I'm doing is I'm taking all of the good frames and I'm placing them off into a separate super like that, and I'll take them off for extraction, and I'll leave all of the half-filled frames or the frames of foundation and we'll put them back on and leave them for the bees to finish. So there's plenty of nice frames there with capped honey, but this frame here has actually got nectar in, so open stores. And I'll just kind of give you a nice closeup of that there now. You can't extract a frame like that. There's really no benefit. All it's going to do is lower the moisture content. So I'll shake the bees off that one and I'll just give this frame back to them for them to clean up. There's no point extracting any frames like this. All of the supers are now off and the bees are running out of space a little bit. Huge amount of bearding here. And this is normal. This is what we want to see. A lot of people when they do this manipulation they get worried, they get scared, and they think there's too many bees outside the front of the hive. What you're seeing here is lots of summer bees. These bees are going to die in a few weeks' time and there's going to be a natural collapse of that colony. And all you need to do is make sure that the box can fit once that colony has collapsed. So all that is left now is to get this colony of bees here ready for winter. I'm taking off all of the supers. I do not overwinter with supers. And I think this colony here will compress into a single brood box. So the operation now is to take off the supers, take off the queen excluder, get a polyasphalte feeder in. I'll be doing varroa treatments, I'll be feeding them, but every single bee that you see here that was in a 5-super stack is going to get compressed into one brood box. So this is how I'm getting my bees ready for winter. Queen excluder comes off because you do not need that. I'm shaking in all the bees from my super. I'll blow out any remaining bees later on. So then the next thing I need to do is get my polyasphalt feeder on. I'm just going to push some of the bees off because I do not want to crush any of those bees. We give them a little puff of smoke just to get them down as well, and then just flick the remainders off like that. And then what we've got here is a polyasphalt feeder, a really good insulated feeder, and we're going to place that on the bees. So once my polyasphalt feeder is on, I'm going to come back later on tonight once all of these bees are inside, and I'm going to give them some sugar syrup. 1:1 sugar syrup. I'm going to put my Apivar strips in, and then I leave them. That is it. They've got 8 weeks to do what they want. That's it. They will beard a little bit during that time as well on the front. Do this when it's nice weather, and within about 3 or 4 days, all of those bees will have gone inside. This colony here has swarmed, but they have definitely bounced back, and I cannot wait to see how they do in 2026.
