Swarming is natural behaviour for bees and their form of reproduction so why do we interfere with it.
Apart from public nuisance and varoa that others have talked about you also have the loss of honey production both from the depopulation of your hive and competition with feral hives. Reproduction is also pretty dangerous to hives and even before varoa the survival rate of swarms was not high. Many hives that swarm also end up hopelessly queenless and die without intervention. This gets even worse when they swarm later in the spring, usually sometime in November and when these great big strong hives go they tend to follow-up the initial swarm led by the old Queen with after swarms led by virgins and in many of these hives you will end up with a handful of queenless bees. A good spring flow followed by a dearth period can lead to very difficult swarming conditions that are very hard to stop.
I can't prove it but I'm pretty sure that when bees swarm in an apiary situation they tend to gather up a lot of the other bees flying around the same time and when a good portion of an apiary swarms you can end up with not only a whole lot of weak and often queenless hives but also the hives that didn't swarm have lost most of their field bees as well.
Many years ago we used to also do a lot of mini mating nukes and often if you didn't cage the Queen's within a few days of them starting to lay they would swarm with multiple units and queens all ending up in little swarms with up to 10 queens.
Note. Queens should ideally not be caged before they have sealed brood at the very minimum. The queens from those mini nukes were not the best.
Rather than managing hives to prevent swarming I think it is better to manage hives in such a way that they think they have swarmed and thus need to build up their resources for the next swarming season
Wow.
I actually like you answer. not just a knee jerk response. thank you.
What public nuisance?
How does this cause a lose of honey production? Do you know that to be the case or also quoting previous works?/personal experiences?
..'.competition from feral hives' ??? seriously? in this country where we apparently have no feral hives left cos they all died.
' swarms end up hopelessly Queenless?' do you know this or quoting?
" This gets even worse when they swarm later in the spring, usually sometime in November and when these great big strong hives go they tend to follow-up the initial swarm led by the old Queen with after swarms led by virgins and in many of these hives you will end up with a handful of queenless bees. A good spring flow followed by a dearth period can lead to very difficult swarming conditions that are very hard to stop.'
I was lead to believe that the swarm lead by the old Queen was considered to be a 'prime swarm' and that the hives that swarmed late in summer were the most at risk of failing. Cast swarms being those following the virgin Queens and so, being smaller in numbers.
I would like to know more about the difficulties in stopping swarms and the reasons for this given the conditions you have mentioned. (It does run contrary to what I have learnt to date.)
'I can't prove it but I'm pretty sure that when bees swarm in an apiary situation they tend to gather up a lot of the other bees flying around the same time and when a good portion of an apiary swarms you can end up with not only a whole lot of weak and often queenless hives but also the hives that didn't swarm have lost most of their field bees as well.'
I dont understand how this could be, but this is also something I would like to learn more about. ..Why would it leave a whole lot of queenless hives, for example? That doesnt make sense to me.
To me, it would indicate that all was not well with the apiary to begin with.
'Many years ago we used to also do a lot of mini mating nukes and often if you didn't cage the Queen's within a few days of them starting to lay they would swarm with multiple units and queens all ending up in little swarms with up to 10 queens.'
So mini nucs with newly mated Queens will swarm....naturally.
Interesting. Perhaps that was because the bees felt their 'home' was too small...?
'Rather than managing hives to prevent swarming I think it is better to manage hives in such a way that they think they have swarmed and thus need to build up their resources for the next swarming season'
But what if I think that they have the right to swarm? How would this negatively impact on the remaining colony?
