What Every Beekeeper Needs to Know in May
Laurence Edwards covers May management for UK beekeepers: weekly inspections, adding supers early to prevent swarming, and recognizing queen cells. He details swarm-prevention strategies including pre-emptive splits, queen replacement, and the Demaree split, a double-brood configuration that converts to a honey super after the June gap.
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Here are all the questions that you should be asking yourself as a beekeeper in May. Now, April, easy. May, easy. The beekeeping season does not stay this way. June, July, August, September all have really challenging aspects to them, and I'll cover them all in this series, making sure that you're asking yourself the right question. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's focus in on May. And the first question that you should be asking is, are you inspecting your colonies frequently enough to keep up with swarm season? Are you doing your inspections every single seven days? Is there any way the way you're doing your inspections you could miss a swarm cell? Maybe you're not shaking the bees off the frames, and maybe you've come back to the bees thinking, "Well, there were no swarm preps last week," and now I'm coming in and I can see capped cells. Surely I must have missed something. Most importantly, are you staying ahead of the bees? Are you preemptively going in and adding those supers and making sure that the bees are never hitting the roof? Or do you come to do your inspection and you take off the roof and? It's full and the bees have backfilled everything and they've worked it all the way down and started congesting the brood nest. Now there's a rule that I like to use, and some people like to debate whether it's 2 frames of bees or 3 frames of bees due to the mortality rate in the colony, but it's a really simple rule. It's my 1-2-3 rule, which means that 1 frame of brood turns into 2 frames of bees in 3 weeks' time. Now the original rule talked about 1 frame of brood turning into 3 frames of bees, which it does, but the 1-2-3 rule modifies that a little bit Take into account mortality. It works quite well like this. So it's 1 frame of brood turns into 2 frames of bees in 3 weeks' time. So if you are going through your colony, maybe your colony's got a couple of supers on and you've got a brood nest and there's 10 frames of brood in there and they're just about ready to hit the ceiling and you're thinking, should I add another super or not? I'd be looking at that and saying, well, in 2 weeks' time that is gonna be wanting 3 or 4 supers adding onto it. And maybe you need to double up the brood area as well. In May, the colonies can swarm very, very quickly. And they can go from fine to swarming in under a week. Now the main driver for that, I would say 99 times out of 100, is that the beekeeper has not stayed ahead. The colony has hit the roof, they've backfilled the entire supers all the way down, and then the congestion builds in the brood nest, and then that leads to swarming. So if you're adding supers around the beginning of May, don't add one super, definitely add 2. In some instances, you can add 2 supers and come back and curse yourself because you probably could have got away with 3. These are big, strong colonies at this point in the year. You've not gotta worry about dead space in the hive. You've not gotta worry too much about any thermal dynamics or losing heat. The stores conundrum generally fixes itself at this time of the year. You've not gotta worry about stores. The bees have got more than enough. You just need to manage that space and you need to do something to stop the bees swarming. But the last thing you want is the bees to go ahead and swarm 'cause you've not given them enough space. If you flip that on its head and just say, well, let's give them unlimited space, what are the disbenefits of doing that? It's inefficient. You put on too many boxes, so it costs you a lot more. When you go to get your honey out, go to get your honey harvest out, it's all over the place. There's a bit up there, there's a bit down there. As you move towards June and July and August, when robbing and wasps become an issue, you want big, strong, compressed colonies that can defend themselves, not big stacks that are 50% full of bees. So there's a balance, as always with beekeeping. There's a balance of giving too much of something or not giving enough of something. And your role as the beekeeper is to try and get that just right. In May though, err on the side of caution. If you're going to give them space, make sure you give them plenty of space. So another question that you might ask yourself in May is, are my colonies going to swarm right now? When I do my inspections, are there charged queen cells present? Is the colony congested? Did they hit the roof? Am I seeing nectar backfilling down into the brood nest? If you're seeing lots of nectar all the way through the brood nest, and maybe she stopped laying eggs completely, then that is your warning sign. The colony is going to swarm very, very quickly, and you need to do something about it before the bees go ahead and swarm. Now, if you've got your bees all the way through to May and they've not swarmed yet, don't take that as they're not going to swarm. You are in peak swarm season. It doesn't get any better for bees than in May because there is copious nectar, there's copious pollen, it's really nice and warm, the days are getting longer. The bees know that they've got plenty of time left to build up a new colony elsewhere, so you don't need to give them a second excuse to go and swarm. If you can them in, they're definitely going to go. But it's almost best to get in the habit of saying, well, I think all colonies are going to swarm, I need to do something about it. And this is where the preemptive demeroi split comes in. My recommendation to everybody, no matter whether you're a beginner or an experienced beekeeper, is you need to do something to manage swarming throughout the season. Now that sounds incredibly generic, and I will give you further detail on what you should be doing, but there's loads of different options for you here. If you're in May and you've just got one colony of bees and they're building up really nicely and you're enjoying your beekeeping, Then I would say the easiest thing for you to do, and the question that you should be asking yourself here is, do I want to put all of my eggs in one basket to take one single colony through the winter? It's not a sensible approach because beekeeping is expensive. You would've piled loads of money into that. And although your colony might look good now, you've got a queen, you've got brood, you've got honey, you've got everything you want. The picture in September and October, if this colony swarms and then gets attacked by wasps and slows right down, you might not actually be able to get them through and you lose everything. So a great question to ask yourself in May is, how can I mitigate that? Can I do anything differently in order to protect that investment? And yes, it's the simplest thing in the world. Make up a 1 or 2 frame split. Now, people don't realize that in April and in May, you can be very, very aggressive when it comes to making splits. You can take a single frame of brood, a single frame of stores, take out the existing mated queen, put that into the nuc that your bees came in, and And go and take it off to another apiary if you've got one. Much, much easier to do it in another apiary. If you've not got another apiary, just stuff loads of sticks or grass in the entrance, do it late at night, and close them in overnight. And then the next morning, just expect maybe a third of the bees to fly back to the original one. And do not start feeding, or else they will rob it out. But what you've taken out of that colony there, your big strong single colony, is a small nuc, a small 1 or 2 frame nuc that is going to have a negligible effect on the overall colony. It's not going to miss those resources at all. Build that nuc up. It's got a queen, it's got brood, it's got eggs, it's got everything it needs. It's got stores. And after a few days, once all of the bees have bled back to the main hive, you can start feeding that and building that up. And there you go, you've got a nuc to take through the winter. It's a brilliant insurance policy and it has no impact on your colony. We're talking like a 1 to 5% reduction in honey as an absolute maximum, done in May like this. Now with the remaining colony, you can just leave them At that point, you're going to put them into the emergency response mode. They're going to create loads of emergency cells. You don't actually need to go back and do anything. You could just let them requeen themselves naturally if you are confident enough to be able to spot a virgin and kill her if she fails. It's a real risk, and I do not recommend that for beginners. But for everybody else, if you want to make it as easy as possible, if you go back in after 8 days of taking out that split, you're going to have emergency cells all over the place. Shake all of the bees off, take down all of the emergency cells, put in a new mated queen. I recommend an F1 Buckfast from Black Mountain Honey. And then after 24 hours, pop the tab and leave it for a week. Now what that might seem like you're doing there is just swapping out one queen for another one, and I guess that is exactly what you're doing. It's a slightly safer approach when it comes to keeping the colony intact versus letting them requeen themselves. But what you are doing there is you're upgrading the queen from an old previous year queen to a new queen that is literally a matter of weeks old. that massively suppresses the swarming instinct because queens like to swarm as they get older. With a new queen, you can completely fool that colony and maybe they won't start swarm preps throughout the year, but definitely keep an eye on them because if they do start swarm preps, then you've got it really, really easy. Take out the existing queen that is in there now, the new 2026 queen, make up another 1 or 2 frame split to further mitigate that risk of anything going on over the winter. And then all you need to do is knock down every single swarm cell that they've created And just leave one. Now again, maybe not for beginner beekeepers, this one, but the brilliance in that one there is that if they do go ahead and swarm and you've taken action like that, not only have you secured both of those nucs to give you 2 nucs going over winter when you were just going to have this one big colony, but it also finally sets that big colony up for no further work throughout the season. If they've gone to June or July and they've swarmed at that point, and you've gone in, taken out the queen, knocked down all the swarm cells, left a single swarm cell there, then they should be good for the rest of the year. No further swarming. Assume you go out and get that queen. Now this is the bit that I love that connects all of those bits together. If that queen does not go out and get mated and you're confident going in and killing that virgin, you can go ahead later on in the season, find the virgin, kill her, merge her with one of the nucs, and you have successfully navigated an entire season without losing any bees to swarming, even though you've had one failed virgin, and you've got yourself an additional backup nuc as well. So this is where a little bit of strategy, a little bit of thinking ahead, a little bit of questioning your practices really pays dividends for your investment and makes sure that you've got the resources that you need to mitigate future risk now. And that mitigation actually helps your bees. It lowers the swarming impulse, and it means that your beekeeping becomes a little bit easier. What most people do is they get their nuc, they don't really understand the management of it, they don't understand how quickly they grow, the bees swarm without taking any sort of insurance or mitigation, and then the beekeeper really struggles to get back on track. So my advice for you in May Take advantage of the fact that you can make super small splits. Take advantage of the fact that making these small splits are going to temporarily slow down the swarming in your colony. Take advantage of the fact that any frames that you take out and add back in as foundation is again going to suppress that swarming instinct. And just use the resources that you've got now to protect yourself for what's going to happen in June, July, and August. Because believe me, June, July, and August are nowhere near as easy as May. So a lot of people will go into their beehives and open up the colony and not realize that they have lost a swarm. We get this all the time. People calling up and saying, "I've definitely not lost a swarm because when I open up the beehive, there's still the same amount of bees there." Now I disproved this a number of times on my videos and have shown colonies that have swarmed that I watched swarm ten or fifteen minutes ago, and then going into the colonies and looking at them and thinking, "There's no way you'd know that this colony had swarmed just by looking at the top frames, just by looking at the amount of bees that are in there." Because even after like 24-48 hours, the amount of brood that they leave behind just completely replaces all of the bees that are lost. Very, very difficult to tell that one. The only way I would say you know if a colony has swarmed is A, you saw it swarm, or B, you've gone in there and there are capped queen cells, no queen, and no eggs. If you're going in to inspect your bees and you're seeing those 3 things— capped queen cells, no eggs, and no queen— it's almost certain that your colony has swarmed. And damage limitation at this point is to identify your very best swarm cell, just one, place it off to one side somewhere, And then go through every single other frame, shake off the bees, take down every single swarm cell that's there, and then go back to the frame with the one that you've identified as the good swarm cell and just manually knock down any other ones that are on that frame without shaking it. You never want to shake your good larva because you could dislodge them, and then you're just going to end up with a failed colony. What that will do is that will limit the amount of cast swarms that are going out of a colony. So the first swarm that leaves in the season is called the prime swarm. But if you had a colony like that that was going through swarm preparations with multiple queen cells, and you just left them to it, what would happen is the first queen, the original queen, would go off and take the prime swarm. And then as those virgins emerge, there is further capacity to lose cast swarms, which is a much smaller portion of bees with those individual virgins. So you need to be doing every single thing that you possibly can in order to reduce or eliminate this swarming. You can do that through clipping queens as well. So clipping queens will not stop the colony swarming. It would just change the dynamic of the prime swarm. So we said previously the prime swarm would be the first, the original queen, the mated queen that's in the colony going off and taking about 50% of the bees with her. Now if that queen is clipped, which is just nipping off a tip of a wing, unbalances the queen, which means she can't swarm. So when those bees try and swarm and they say, come on queen, we're going out on a swarming mission, she kind of looks up and says, can't fly, sorry about that. They often go off into the air, realize they've not got a queen, and then come back. And then the beekeeper comes in and sees something like this, which is A clipped queen, no eggs, and capped swarm cells. That's a brilliant situation. That is the benefit of clipping your queen, because it gives you 3 days like that. The colony can't swarm because it doesn't have a flying queen to be able to swarm with. But as soon as those virgin queens start to emerge, the prime swarm will still go. It won't go with the clipped mated queen, it will just go with the first virgin that emerges. Now, clipping queens is great because what you can do at that point is you can just go in, Knock down all of the swarm cells by one, take off your clipped queen, make up a little nuc, and then leave her there. If you're confident in clipping your wing, it will make your life so much easier, and it will pretty much eliminate the chances of losing a swarm so long as you do 7-day inspections. If you clip your queen and don't go and inspect for 2 or 3 weeks, then it makes no difference whatsoever. So only clip your queens if you're willing to inspect every single 7 days. But I do recommend it. I like to clip my queens. It makes a massive difference, and I think it's a good thing to do if you're a responsible beekeeper. Beekeeper. So let's assume the colony is set up perfectly, and they're not going to go ahead and swarm. Do your colonies have enough space for a nectar flow? Are the supers filling up already? Are you going in and adding those supers in before they're needed? Are you thinking should I be adding them one at a time, or should I be waiting for one to fill up and then adding another one on? There's no right or wrong answer here, and you'll see a lot of beekeepers like to add on one super. They use the 80% rule. So as soon as that box is 80% full, they add another one on, and they'll just keep on going through like that. Now, if the bees are in your back garden and you've got a very regular 7-day cycle, but you can pop in if you see something abnormal happening, then I would say that's a really good strategy for you. Just do it one at a time, but if it's really nice weather, you might just pop down in after 3 days and add another super on. If you're going in and just doing weekly inspections, I would say as a minimum you should be adding 2 supers at a time. When you think the colony needs a super, add 2, and then that should give you sufficient space for your weekly inspections to make sure that they never ever hit the ceiling. There'll still be the 5% where you add 2 supers on and you just get a nectar tsunami and they hit the roof and they swarm, but in those instances you generally have a lot of honey to kind of make you feel a little bit better that you've lost your bees. The best bit of advice that I can give you in terms of May beekeeping though is plan for it in September. October, November, December, January, February, March, you need to fill your supers up, you need to assemble all of the boxes, you need to assemble the frames, you need to get the foundation in. And you need to be looking at it in March thinking there is no way that I'm going to use all of this kit, and then come back to it in June and you will have used double the amount of kit that you produced. You really do need to prep because people underestimate just what can happen in a week. And if you're watching this in May, maybe look back to one of the nicer back-end weeks of April as an example. I know a lot of people that went ahead, put 2 supers on, went back to do their next inspection, and 2 supers weren't Enough. So maybe 3 supers is the answer in that exact scenario there. And I would just say to you, don't be scared to go really aggressive at this time because the worst thing that can happen, say you go to a colony and you think, hmm, I think it needs a super, and you just add 3 on, and then you come back in a week's time and they've only built out one of them or filled one of them or maybe one and a half. And you think, oh, that's annoying. It's not the end of the world, is it? The bees didn't swarm and they're still working nicely. And that additional space at this time of the year is negligible. It's not going to be impacting them at all when it comes to heat. But in a scenario where the nectar does come in and maybe you fill up 2.5 supers, like, the difference in terms of honey production and the fact that you still keep your bees and you can make splits from them is really sensible beekeeping management. And it's something that you should be looking for and really going ahead and doubling down on that space in May. So the next question you should be asking yourself is, are you managing your space both in the brood box And in the supers at the same time. Your brood box is going to be actively expanding at this point, and if you're on single brood, it might be the point where you think, hmm, maybe we should switch over to double brood to give the bees unlimited space downstairs in the brood box to try and restrict or lower the impulse for swarming. Now that's a good plan, and if you're not worried about honey production, it's a really good swarm mitigation measure. Again, it's not a silver bullet, but it will lower that urge for the bees to swarm. But the impact that it's going to have on your honey production is huge. Giving the bees additional space either underneath the brood box or above the brood box but underneath the queen excluder, you're going to lose a lot of that nectar down there. The bees are going to take that as honey storage space, which again might be a good thing, might be protecting you and setting you up really nicely for the June gap depending on what your June strategy is. And then if you bring that into winter, it gives you a really nice setup around the brood nest and a great buffer against starvation. Maybe you're looking at that colony and thinking, well, I want to make some splits anyway at some point, so double brooding now gives you the ability to go into June and July making up some splits while still keeping a decent brood nest there. But double brooding at this time of the year isn't for everyone, and I would say if you're going down the route of trying to get as much honey as possible, I don't think it's the best thing for you, especially not when the preemptive Demarée is just perfect for this. So the preemptive Demarée split is super simple, and it is just double brood in a slightly different configuration. So normally when people talk about double brood, they mean brood box, brood box, queen excluder, and then all the supers above. But the Demaray split does it slightly differently, which is brood box, queen excluder, all of your supers, and then another brood box at the top. And the configuration between those 2 brood boxes is how the Demaray works, which is all of the bees in your brood box get lifted up to the top. All of the bees, the queen, the brood, brood in all stages, just everything. You lift the entire brood box to the top. And replace it underneath with a brand new brood box full of foundation. The manipulation then is so simple. You find the queen on a frame of capped brood from the top and you place her downstairs in the bottom brood box. Fill in the gap upstairs with a frame of foundation. Wait 8 days and they'll probably make emergency queen cells up in the top. You go back in, tap all of those queen cells down. And the beauty of the Demaray system is that once you've done that manipulation, once you've started it, you get about 3 weeks of major swarm suppression. If you align that with the busiest, swarmiest month of the year, which is May, you really reduce the chance of your bees swarming. I've never ever in my life had a single colony swarm when I've done a preemptive demeray. If you find a colony of bees that is trying to swarm and you do a demeray, then they will just continue to swarm. They do not like that. But if you go in and find them before they start doing any of this swarm prep and do that double brood manipulation, the demeray split, then you stand a much better chance of getting all of those bees through May, and then you can reconfigure bigger for the June gap if you want. And there's a really nice switch-up that you can do back on the June gap that a lot of people don't realize because they want to maximize their honey. So the way that the Demerare works is that that top brood box, once all of the brood emerges out of it, the bees will backfill that with nectar. And if you've not treated those frames with Amitraz or anything that's going to taint the wax, you can just go ahead and extract all of the honey in that top brood box, which turbocharges your honey yield. It really does give you crazy, crazy yields, especially considering that a deep brood box is about 40— 35-40 pounds worth of honey. But if you've done this manipulation maybe May the 7th, something like that, and you've got your 3 weeks through to the back end of May, you need to be thinking about the June gap. Now I know this is not the June video, but if I did the June gap in the June video, it's way too late because the June gap doesn't always take place in June. The June gap in the UK is just this period in between the spring flowers and in between the summer flowers. There is just a bit of nothing where there isn't really much forage available for the bees. Sometimes this can last for a week, sometimes it can last for a day, sometimes it's back into May, sometimes it's early June, sometimes it's middle of June. It kind of moves around depending on how much moisture there is and how much sunshine, but it always comes, and you can generally see it in the bees. They get a bit angry around the June gap. Now what a lot of people do, a huge mistake that people make, and a question I guess that they would ask themselves is, Should I harvest my honey before the June gap? Now I'll talk a little bit later on about when you should harvest honey and when you should take some and bank it, but what I see so many people doing is they'll go in and say, yeah, 4 supers of honey, brilliant, isn't beekeeping easy? Take off their 4 supers of honey, they leave behind a brood box, and they think, well, just going to put another 4 empty supers on. I'll be back at the end of June to collect all of my honey. Thank you very much, bees. This is a very easy hobby, isn't it? And then they come back and the bees are dead. Now that switch up is really noticeable back end of May, early June, when you hit the June gap, when that forage doesn't come in, when the nectar's not coming in. The colony loses all of the resources that it had in order to continue growing, in order to continue gathering nectar. And you see this massive reduction in the number of bees, massive reduction in the brood, and also a massive reduction in the amount of honey in your supers. If you had 4 full supers going into the June gap and the June gap lasted, say, a week, I'd be amazed if you still had 2 supers left after the end of the June gap. So we'll talk about honey collection strategies and what you should be doing, but let's link this back into the demaray, which is if you did the demaray on the 7th of May and you get through to the back end of May, early June, and your bees haven't swarmed, but you notice that you've entered the June gap, this is the best manipulation ever, which is you take the top brood box, which is now just a super full of honey, and you go and place that Underneath the brood box. So you convert it back to a double brood configuration. You're saying to the colony, okay, I appreciate that there's nothing coming in at the moment. I'm going to remove all of your supers. I'm taking away all of the food up in the supers because I'm going to go away and harvest that. But I'm giving you back a 40-pound brood box, really accessible stores, and then that should be enough to see them through the June gap. But it gets a little bit better than that as well. So once you get through the June gap, you get to the 21st of June and you've reached the summer solstice and the days are now shortening. You might be thinking, I'm losing a lot of honey downstairs to my double brood configuration. So the quick fix here is you just give them tons more space above. Add those supers back on if you've extracted all your honey. Go into that bottom brood box, bruise up all of those wax cappings, and then as long as you've got that underneath the brood— so you'll have honey, brood, and then supers above— as long as you uncap all of that honey, then the bees will just move it back up and put it back into the supers for you. So it's knowing how to manipulate your bees like that, knowing how you can take advantage of different things throughout the year to try and give you what you need, to try and preserve your honey harvest. But much more importantly than that, keep your bees healthy, keep your bees well fed all the way throughout the season. Ensure that you're not taking off all the honey at the point when the nectar flow stops and not giving the bees anything back. You really do need to think ahead when it comes to taking honey off. But the flip side of that is May is a brilliant time. to take some honey off. You'll see this happen so many times over, and it really becoming a theme, I would say, in the UK for us in North Wales, which is it's very, very rare to get a brilliant spring harvest and a brilliant summer harvest. One is always better than the other because you get really nice spells of weather. So this year, let's say you've got your colony, you've got 3 or 4 supers on, you're coming towards the June gap, and you're thinking, well, what do I do? What a lot of people do is they just leave their supers on. If you get a terrible June gap and then a terrible back end of the year, you might have had 4 supers in May and you might have no supers come the end of the year and you didn't get a honey crop. Now I'm not suggesting that you go in and just take the 4 supers off and not give them anything back, but that is a strategy that you could use. You could go in, take the 4 supers off, extract everything, convert to double brood, put the feeders back on and feed the bees through the June gap, through the early bit of June, and then you've got a double brood colony that you can split out into 2, And then come maybe early July, you can go ahead and put the supers on the 2 colonies like that. Really nice system, that one, especially if you're wanting to expand. But I would say the halfway house, and this is probably what I'd recommend to most people, is if you've got 4 supers on, just take 2 off. Take the 2 best supers off, uncap it, get it into the buckets, bank it, and then leave the rest for the bees to make sure that they can get through the June gap on a single brood box. That is the path of least resistance here. It doesn't remove the swarming impulse. It's going to give you the maximum amount of honey possible by keeping that brood nest But it means that if the season fails and gets really, really bad, at least you've got something in the bank. 2 supers of honey is probably about 100, 120 small jars, 8-ounce jars of honey, which is a pretty decent crop. Like, I think most people, if you said to them you got 120 jars in your first year, would you be happy with that? Most people would take that. My advice to you is take it now whilst you can. You need to make sure that the frames are fully capped over, or at least 80% capped over. And if you're doing oilseed rape honey, you need to be shaking it to make sure that it's not coming out of the frames. Frames even if it's not uncapped. Do a separate video— I've done a number of separate videos, I think, on shaking out oilseed rape frames. So yes, go ahead, definitely take a couple of supers. If you are dealing with oilseed rape, your honey extraction, your honey harvest is going to come a little bit earlier. You don't want to be waiting to see all of the cells completely capped over. For oilseed rape honey, that is too late and it will start to granulate in the comb. So you want to be going in and identifying when the oilseed rape is turning over, when the bees are starting to get a little bit grumpy because the flow's finished, and then go and assess what you've got. Every single frame, if you shake it and nothing comes out, it is good for harvest. So when you're going through your colony and you're doing your inspections and you find queen cells, do you know what those queen cells are actually telling you? Do you even know what those queen cells are? Are you able to distinguish between these different cells? There's swarm cells, there's supersedure cells, and there are emergency cells. Now they're really easy to tell apart. Swarm cells and supersedure cells look Identical. They look exactly the same. The only way to tell the difference between them is the total number that are in the brood box. If you're opening up a colony and there's 30 cells and they're all over the place, whether they're on the face of the frame or on the bottom bars, it doesn't matter where they are, but they look like full swarm cells that are drawn down from play cups, then it's likely your colony is swarming. If you go through and you see the exact same type of cell, but there's only 1 or 2 of them throughout the whole brood box, again, doesn't matter where those cells are, whether they're on the face of the frame, the side, or the bottom bars, That is supersedure. Now swarming is just a colony's way of reproducing itself, so if you see multiple cells like that all over the place, the colony is saying, we are going to swarm. If the cells are capped, they've probably swarmed already. But if you just see one or two cells, that means the colony is trying to replace its queen. Maybe she's been damaged, maybe she's got a broken leg or something, and the bees say, well, she's not doing what she needs to do, we just want to replace her, we're not looking to swarm. Now supersedure is really, really rare. I would say it's single digits that I've ever witnessed a supersedure taking place. I think it happens a lot more than we see it, but it's quite rare to see. It doesn't happen all the time. You could go years without seeing supersedure. The final cell is the emergency cell. Now these cells are created with the emergency response, which is you take away the queen, take away her pheromone, and the bees say, ah, we've not got a queen. So they go ahead and raise a queen from young larva that are within standard worker cells. Now depending on the size of the colony, there could be one emergency cell or there could be 50 emergency cells. You can tell an emergency cell by the shape. It has a 90-degree kink in it, whereas swarm cells and supersedure cells are both straight. 9 times out of 10, if you're going into your colony in May and you're seeing lots of cells, your bees are swarming. And I can say that without even looking at your colony. It really is quite reliable. Supersedure in May isn't unheard of, but it is very, very rare. And if you're seeing smaller cells with that kink in— and when I say kink, you've got to imagine the frame is kind of front on like that, so the bees, the cells go in like that, and the kink goes like this, then that is an emergency cell, and that indicates that you likely killed your queen on the last inspection. So another question you should ask yourself, and one that I see many beekeepers getting wrong, which is, should I be splitting my beehives now, or should I split my beehives later on in the year? Splitting beehives now, early on in the season, has a negligible impact on honey production and takes far less resource to make a big colony come the end of There's no wasps, there's no robbing bees to contend with, and the fact that it doesn't have a massive impact on the donor colony just makes so much sense to me. We make all of our splits in April, May, and a tiny little bit of June, but come the middle of June they're all made. Because if I've got a colony that's got 10 frames and I want to make a split out of it, do I want to take 1 frame of brood and 1 frame of stores away from that colony and add in a mated queen, or do I want to take 3 or 4 frames of brood and a couple of frames of stores away and then add in a mated queen? I definitely want to do the easier one, the one that's nowhere near as resource intensive. But many people get caught up in the the fun of beekeeping in April and May, and all of the honey coming in, and wondering about when they're going to do their harvest. And it's not until post-June gap when they start thinking about making splits. And it's at that point of the year that it becomes very very difficult to make splits because the robbing bees hammer you. You can't feed anywhere near as easily. The wasps get in, and that is even worse. If you're trying to get queens raised at that point in the year. So it makes total sense to make the splits early on, get the benefit of making them early on that there's not that much resource being used, but also the small amount of swarm suppression that making a split or taking a split out of a colony can give you during that peak swarm season. It's working out what you want, working out what the bees need, and then trying to piece it all together in a way that you both get as much as you can, right? So I see a few people still doing this on social media, and it's not to say that it's wrong, but it depends on what you're aiming for. So the question is, should I have stopped feeding completely now? And I would say in May, absolutely yes, if you've got honey production colonies. So if you've got big brood boxes full of bees, 8 frames of brood, and then loads of supers full of honey as well, you don't want to be thinking about doing any sort of feeding whatsoever. You certainly don't want to feed through the supers or contaminate any of your honey. But if you're building up a double brood to make splits, or you've got small 1 or 2 frame splits that are struggling a little bit with resource, then absolutely you should still be feeding your bees. So it's not a case of is it right or wrong to feed in May, it's a case of what are you doing, is it right to be feeding your bees at this time. Whether it's honey production colonies or small splits, each colony is going to have a completely different plan. So I've done a full 360 on this one. I used to do this all the time, and then I stopped doing it as a disease management technique, and now I've moved back to doing it again. And the question is, am I managing colony balance across the apiary? Are some of my colonies too strong? Are other colonies too weak? Should I be moving brood and resources around? Is it better to balance it, or is it better to just leave the big ones to swarm? Definitely not better to I'd definitely avoid leaving colonies to swarm. It's a good question, that one. And as I say, it's one that I've struggled with a little bit, and it's one that I have reverted back to balancing colonies because I do find it makes it much, much easier to get them through May if you can pinch a couple of frames out of the strong ones and put them into the weaker ones. Now, you need to be careful. You can activate robbing whilst doing this. You should never be adding in frames of bees, but you can take resources. You can take frames of eggs, you can take frames of brood, You can take frames of stores and you can balance colonies to try and give them what they need. If you've got big strong colonies, they might need space, so you should be giving them frames of foundation. But maybe there's no space to put those frames of foundation, and there shouldn't be in a fully stocked hive. Maybe that colony's got too many frames of stores in the brood box. So you can take a frame of stores, shake all of the bees off, go and add it into a nuc or another colony that's struggling in terms of stores, and then replace that frame in the big strong beehive with some foundation. It's a really simple swap that helps Both sides. The nuc has got more resources, it's got more buffer against starvation, and the big strong colony has now got more space and it's got some foundation which should suppress that swarming urge, albeit temporarily. So I think it's a good question. I think it's something that people should be doing. I think it's something that is a good strategy, helps you understand a little bit about your bees as well, and it gives you a better chance of getting a more average crop across the entire apiary. So there we go, lots of questions for beekeepers in May. Hopefully you're finding this series useful. June is next, and if you have a specific question that you'd like me to answer in the June version, stick it in the comments and I'll do my very best.
