What To Do Immediately After Your Bees Swarm

You've come down to your hive and you've found that your bees have swarmed. In this video, I'm going to show you what to do next. So swarming is the most frustrating thing in the world, but without swarming, we wouldn't have honeybees. That is the way that honeybees reproduce. They create a swarm cell or numerous swarm cells. The original queen takes half of the bees from the hive, flies off, goes into someone's chimney, and leaves you behind with half of the bees and numerous swarm cells. Now obviously what you want to do is avoid swarming happening. The way you do that is you do regular 7-day inspections and you make sure you do not miss any swarm cells. Right, that's sting number 1 in this video. Let's see how many we can get through. So as I was saying, the objective of beekeeping is to get through and make sure that the bees do not swarm. But if you come down to your bees and you find numerous capped swarm cells, it's highly likely that the colony has swarmed. Now at this point you have 2 ways that you can go. One option is letting that colony of bees naturally requeen themselves, and if you're going to go down that option, what you want to do is take down every single swarm cell that you can see barring one. I always recommend leaving one open charged swarm cell. The reason I leave one is that if you leave 2, there's a chance that they'll throw out further cast swarms. So I always leave just one cell, and the reason that I leave one open cell is that I want to identify that there's a nice larva inside and that And I'm always gonna pick the one with the most royal jelly. That's just the way that I do it. Once you've knocked down all of those queen cells and you've left just one open charged queen cell, you can leave them for 3 or 4 weeks. There is no need for you to come back any further. The bees are not gonna swarm anymore because you've taken it down to one swarm cell, and going back in earlier, all you're gonna do is interrupt a virgin, maybe make her fly off and she won't come back. There's no benefit to going in earlier, so there's no need to go in earlier. If that's your option, leave it 4 weeks, don't come back. Hopefully you will have a mated queen after 4 weeks. Now with the weather as it is in the UK at the moment, if you do that and you take down all of the swarm cells barring one, and then you get a really poor spell of weather, that virgin queen might not go out and mate, or she might go out, mate poorly, and then you end up with a dwindling colony with a failing queen. Now although that's the cheaper option to go down and you're going to get a UK naturally mated queen, The risk that you take by doing that is that if that queen fails to mate, fixing the problem at a later date becomes far more difficult and you've set your colony back really far. So for instance, say this colony here had swarmed, we'd come back 4 weeks later and we'd found, say, a drone-laying queen or a failed virgin, we would have to revert to what we're going to do in option 2 anyway, which is make the colony hopelessly queenless and add in a mated queen. But the beauty of option 2 and doing it once the bees have swarmed is that it is very, very easy to make the colony hopelessly queenless, and you don't have to go through your colony finding virgins. I struggle to find virgins all the time. It is the most frustrating thing in the world because they're so quick, they're so small, they're not marked, they're very, very difficult to find. So option 2, far, far easier, which is you come to your colony, you find 16, 17 swarm cells, You go in, you take down every single swarm cell, and then once you've knocked down all of those cells, you're going to come back in about 7 or 8 days' time and you're going to knock down any further cells that the bees have made. They're not going to be swarm cells now, they're going to be emergency cells because they're made under a different impulse. This is what a swarm cell looks like, this is what an emergency cell looks like. Once you've taken down all of those emergency cells, the colony is then hopelessly queenless. There's definitely going to be no virgins running around, and you can go straight into introducing a mated queen. Follow the steps as normal, put the queen in, in between brood frames, give it, say, 24 hours in this case, come back, pop the tabs, leave it a week, and then your colony is fixed. Doesn't get much easier than that. And okay, you've lost half of your bees, but if you do that with a new queen going in and laying straight away, you can recover that colony very, very quickly. Quick. So you've got 2 options, one that's a cheaper way with a little bit of risk, one that's a bit more expensive, but it really does mitigate that risk very, very well. Best way of mitigating that completely though is doing your weekly inspections and making sure your bees don't swarm.