[oxnatbees] Re: unexplained swarming
- From: Gareth John <gj.garethjohn@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 25 May 2022 22:37:34 +0100
“by 'run them in', do you mean literally dump the second cast into the hive
where the first are, or something a bit more subtle?”
I mean place a board with a cloth over it in front of the hive and tip the
swarm onto the board in exactly the same way as one would with any swarm. The
only difference is that the hive already has a swarm in it rather than being
empty. Do NOT just dump the bees in. The second swarm needs to go through the
procedure of gaining entry via the entrance so as to acquire permission to be
in the hive.
EVERYTHING with bees is subtle!
Gareth
________________
Gareth John
On 25 May 2022, at 22:20, rich tetlow <rich.tet@xxxxxxx> wrote:
thanks yet again! i should just ask you guys every time i get stuck on
something, shouldn't i? trouble is, theres so much of it, & i'm often not
sure whats important & what i'm just over thinking.
anyway, thats about the most useful thing about varroa i've ever heard. one
of my books has some tables of exactly what different levels of daily/weekly
mite drop mean for the colony, which i shall now feel much happier about
ignoring.
by the by, my latest issue of BBKA news has just arrived, with a short
article about varroa resistant bees that someone has just spent decades
breeding, including the observation that 'honey bees of all types express it
(VSH) at some level'. not the impression i'd been under before!
if i'd thought of it, i'd have definitely merged those casts. by 'run them
in', do you mean literally dump the second cast into the hive where the first
are, or something a bit more subtle? also, would this be ok with casts from
different hives too? sort of assuming ones from the same hive still smelll
the same & accept each other for a bit as a result...
its been 13 days since i hived mine now, & i'm torn! i didn't want 2 extra
colonies just now, but i'd love to see how they get on now they're here. the
first one just looks like a normal, bustling hive, second is a bit
quieter...& the parent colony has gone quite quiet too, i guess theres a
chance they could lose, or have lost, their new queen since i saw her. i'm
also thinking i've a fair chance of more swarms, casts & possible princess
losses later this year, & maybe i'll leave this lot for now, see how they do
& merge them with another weaker colony later in the year if applicable. does
that sound sensible?
.
Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2022 at 10:49 AM
From: "Gareth John" <gj.garethjohn@xxxxxxxxx>
To: oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [oxnatbees] Re: unexplained swarming
I have read that if you merge 2 casts in the evening it is straightforward -
by choosing bad flying weather you force the bees to choose the best queen
themselves.
I invariably merge small (and even not so small) casts. Simply run the second
cast into the hive which contains the first cast. I do this for up to 10 days
after the first cast was hived and have never seen a problem. I would
hesitate with a prime swarms as they have a much greater sense of identity.
The point about mites is exactly as Paul says. You are looking for evidence
of a dynamic balance. A decade or more ago I spent many hours counting mite
fall. I learnt two things: 1) it is variable, going up and down about an
average (indicating a stable balance) and 2) when mite numbers do take off,
because the balance has been lost, the increase is dramatic. One could be
seeing first hand the effect of exponential population growth, or it could be
because the bees are having a clear out. In the latter case numbers begin to
fall again. In the former, not. Ultimately there is only one metric that
counts and that is colony survival. Accepting this is the point at one gives
up treating and gives up counting.
Gareth
Sent from my iPad
On 24 May 2022, at 09:46, Oxnatbees <oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I would consider merging that 3-tennis-ball sized cast with its parent colony
on a day with poor flying weather. That's because I find really small casts
often struggle and fail, and you have Langstroths which are much bigger than
my hives and need more bees to keep warm (especially with open mesh floors).
I have read that if you merge 2 casts in the evening it is straightforward -
by choosing bad flying weather you force the bees to choose the best queen
themselves.
Gareth taught me that there's no threshold above which mite drop is a
"problem", the question is does it suddenly increase which signals it is out
of control. So let's say you see 5 / day or 35 / week. That's not great, but
if it's always 30-40/week they are adapting and controlling the mites. After
a couple of years it seems to drop to much lower levels. But the bottom line
is do they survive without treatment? Making mite counting somewhat obsessive
and unproductive, although it's educational in your early years.
Paul
On Mon, 23 May 2022 at 22:48, rich tetlow <rich.tet@xxxxxxx> wrote:
thanks all!
thanks gareth for the mating swarms info, that explains some of my
bees'recent goings on to perfection, specially if a princess or 2 has gone
off & then not made it back. i did spot a very nippy young queen in the
first hive that swarmed, had about 2 seconds to go, i think thats a....,
then she was off buzzing round my head. at which point i stopped that
inspection, having realised there was nothing i could possibly find that i
was going to be able to do anything useful about.
my thought with the one queen cell was, if i leave 2, current form suggests
i might get another cast, which might again ignore my bait hives & go off to
bother the neighbours. i figured it'd be quite bad luck to not get a viable
queen from either that cell or any of the ones i moved out, & if only one
succeeds i've left the 2 colonies next to each other so i can just recombine
them. i'm quite happy if they stay as one colony, & i daresay if they have
strong feelings to the contrary they'll try again!
i did read somewhere about this unhelpful practice of resealing queen cells,
so i gave the one i left a little gentle poke on the end with the hive tool,
& it seemed solid. though as always, i'm only guessing how much force you'd
need to dislodge a resealed end without damaging a full cell...
good to have a size benchmark for swarms too. i think my second cast
probably wasn't much over 3 tennis balls' worth, so it'll be interesting to
see how they do. up to now i've resisted merging colonies unless one of
them had lost its queen. would you kill one of the queens yourself, or leave
them to fight it out?
i'm aware i'm opening my colonies much less than conventional beekeeping
recommends, & often having to guess whats going on within as a result. if i
was living my best life i'd probably do a lot more looking in for a year or
2 just so i had a sense of what different behaviours meant, prior to leaving
well alone in the future. to be honest, it is sometimes a bit harrowing
going through them though. the biggest one, & occasionally one of the
others, tend to ignore the frame spacings & just build straight from one
super down into the next, so the process of getting frames out involves
ripping the tops off a load of drone brood. i'm always astonished by how
well the bees put up with this, but i still feel bad about it. i had
wondered if going in more often would discourage them from joining frames
top to bottom, but not enough to actually try it.
i think we're done with swarming for the moment. yesterday was very warm,
still, overcast & humid, which i understand is quite swarm inducing weather.
all my colonies were acting like they wanted to swarm, even the ones i know
for a fact haven't started making queen cells yet, but none of them actually
did it. my lady, lou, was wondering whether a hive might swarm with a
princess from an adjacent hive? ie where i've moved all my queen cells to a
new box next door, the bees might still consider themselves one colony?
lynne, i think you're probably right, with the addition that most beekeepers
are making their interventions with the intention of getting more honey
rather than helping the bees to thrive. i abandoned that approach before i'd
really started, because i'm not ruthless enough, & i do think we modern
western humans are doing well enough at the moment that we don't need to
define our relationships with everything else by how much profit we can
wring out of it. i do want honey acquisition to be part of the equation, &
i'm not really in a position to eschew all though of profit & just help the
bees, especially if they're going to keep multiplying at their current rate,
but currently my more important issue is, i don't have sensible, locally
adapted bees that can be trusted to know how to behave. i've got buckfasts,
which might easily keep making casts all year in a way that might work well
if they were in italy, & have never had any need to sort out their own
varroa, to name 2 things i can think of, & there are probably many more. i
know a lot of you guys' advice on natural beekeeping would probably be
'start with something else', & if i was starting again i'd do exactly that,
but i am where i am, & i wouldn't feel right about just standing back &
letting these bees take their chances. i hope they'll mate with local, wild
bees, & pick up enough acumen from them to get by, but i've no idea how long
it might take. or how to check, really. i'm guessing locally adapted bees
won't swarm & make casts more than is useful for them, so i can look for
that. i'm also starting to suspect that the famous varroa sensitive hygiene
isn't that deeply buried after all- one of my hives had varroa quite badly
in autumn, & i did treat for it, but this spring i was seeing evidence of
partly uncapped brood with nothing obviously wrong with it (although this
colony does/did have chalkbrood too), which on the one hand, i've seen in
books as a last, desperate sign that the hive is about to collapse due to
varroa, but also i think is the same behaviour that all varroa resistant
bees have adopted. so i'm trying to keep an eye on mite levels & colony
behaviour ( not very successfully. this is why i'm still using mesh floors,
which neither i nor the bees like, & they don't even work at the moment,
they're full of ants & the bees have been dropping stuff on them so fast
this spring, i've no idea if theres mites in there or not. or what it
signifies if there are, since lots of dead mites might signal a really high
population...or that the bees are getting rid of them as fast as they
emerge). ..where was i? so its not just that i have to get used to low
intervention, my bees have too, & neither of us are expert enough to guide
the process confidently.
so, thats my feeling on low intervention at the moment; its a journey i'm on
rather than a destination i can go straight to. & thanks again to everyone
for all the many useful bits of advice on what bees will naturally do, what
their actions might mean, etc. all helping me get there quicker!
cheers
rich
Sent: Sunday, May 22, 2022 at 11:20 AM
From: "Oxnatbees" <oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxx>
To: oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [oxnatbees] Re: unexplained swarming
Hi Rich
To add to Gareth and Pauly replies, I can relate to your desire to take
action here. I know we all like to know what's going on and to reduce what
we see as a "problem" with our bees. A very natural human perspective.
My personal philosophy is that the key thing about low-intervention, more
natural, beekeeping is to try not to interfere with the bees' natural
behaviours and processes, or only as little as possible.
It is a great human trait to want to understand and "help", but we rarely
can really do so, mostly our actions result in us tending to "interfere" and
try to control. Our understanding is necessarily limited as we are not bees
and their 30 million years of evolution has produced lots of epigenetics,
mechanisms and behaviours tuned to things of which we are only vaguely or
not even aware.
For me, enabling a colony to thrive is really best done by by providing a
suitable environment then largely standing back, so they can pursue their
own needs, like making their own choice of which is the healthiest
best-placed princess to take over (not something we can determine).
So even if there are 12 queen cells left, following natural beekeeping
principles rather than conventional ones, I would not remove any. I've
often seen a prime followed by one or two casts, the greatest number of
swarms I've seen from one hive is 4, others may have seen more, but that was
notably unusual. The multiple queen cells are insurance, the bees do not
allow all princesses to successfully hatch and take a cast, they control it
and will determine the end point for themselves given the balance of their
competing drivers.
Of course, in taking this approach things can still go wrong, princesses may
not mate successfully, may prove defective down the line, or may be lost,
but the risk probability only goes up when we don't leave it to the bees and
try to "help" by limiting their choices
I always try to remind myself to relax and ask if my taking action is really
going to be helping anything or just disrupt. I find the drive to "do
something" while coming from a positive place is often more about making me
"feel" like I'm helping while really I'm not.
For me, being a low intervention beekeepers means trying to resist the
temptation of being all too human!
Lynne
On Sun, 22 May 2022, 09:57 Oxnatbees, <oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Rich,
some similarities with this:
yesterday we inspected one of the hives at Jane's to determine if something
was wrong with it. It is a swarm from one of her hives which has been
grumpy ever since she hived it 14 days before. Every comb - about 9, not
full size yet - was being used for hone / nectar / pollen but there was a
very noticeable absence of brood. In other words, not queen-right. Maybe
she disappeared on a mating flight.
Previous to that, the hive it came from had tried to swarm several times
but gone back in to the hive. This is characteristic of a colony that is
trying to swarm, but the queen can't fly. They eventually swarmed after a
few days, maybe with a princess, who has now died. The colony should be
savable by merging with another swarm or colony, or possibly by giving it
combs of brood from another colony (though Gareth has previously said that
needs to be repeated a few times and just weakens the donor colony).
Generally speaking you are opening your hives more than I would, but I
opened mine a fair bit in my first 2 years and the upside was, it taught me
a lot. And as you have framed hives it is less disruptive than opening
TBHs. But, you will probably find their temper is more relaxed if you open
them less.
I think most beekeepers don't remove ALL extra queen cells because there is
a reasonable chance (15%) that a given princess will not be successful on
her mating flight, so best to leave 1 or 2 spare heirs in the hive if you
do decide to remove or kill some.
If you catch a swarm which is just 3 tennis balls in size, that's too small
to be viable - very high risk of dying after a few months - merge it into
another colony, ideally the one it came from. Luckily your small one
returned to the hive.
Paul
On Sat, 21 May 2022 at 23:19, rich tetlow <rich.tet@xxxxxxx> wrote:
just wondering if anyone can suggest a reason for a recent behaviour of
one of my hives. i've already had one lot swarm out, missed the prime
swarm then had 2 biggish casts, which i caught. a few days ago the next
biggest hive issued a swarm, i'd say about football size. they sat in a
tree for about an hour, then just as i was going to get them picked
themselves up & disappeared into the distance. so quite sprightly, &
purposeful, given the last few have emerged & then hung around for a day
checking out my bait hives. to my shame, i don't actually know if this was
a prime swarm, or if i missed that & it was a very big cast. i suspect the
latter because i immediately looked through the hive, finding about a
dozen sealed queen cells, one in the act of hatching & another with a hole
in the side- ie they'd clearly been there for a bit, & one but not all had
been killed, presumably by another queen. although we didn't see any
hatched queen cells.
anyway, i moved all the frames with queen cells on except one, along with
their bees, into a new brood box. not sure if this is standard practice,
but i've about had enough of casts this year & figured the foragers would
mostly go home, the young bees would stay & rear the princesses & other
brood, & the new colony wouldn't have anywhere near enough bees to swarm
so the princesses would have to sort it out amongst themselves.
the new colony, next to the first, has stayed very quiet, the old one
carried on as before, then a few days later they swarmed again. got a
front seat view because i was working in the greenhouse right next to
them, it was only a little swarm- maybe 3 tennis balls' worth- & they went
& sat on a post about 20 yards away, on top of which i then put a
cardboard box. they immediately started walking up into it, so i went away
for half an hour, but when i came back the weight of bees had dislodged
the box & there was a lot of flying about again. i wedged it back a bit
more firmly, noticing in the process that they'd secreted a lot of wax
scales in their brief stay on the post, & tried again. when i got back
this time the box was empty, & my observation in the interim was, they'd
all gone back to the hive, with a lot trying to rejoin the new brood box
initially, then by the end of the day everyone back in the old hive.
slightly reluctantly i disturbed them again the next day, thinking maybe
there was a queen or princess we'd missed, & expecting the queen cell to
be either hatched or torn down, but no, we had a good thorough look this
time & could find no queen, or princess, & the cell still intact. we did,
embarrassingly, find another one we'd missed previously, which i moved
across to the new box with the rest.
so, this is the second time this year i've had a swarm come out, sit for a
bit then go back in. first time i thought their queen had suffered some
accident, but i thought that was a bit tenuous then, & i refuse to believe
its happened twice. i wonder if they sometimes follow a princess out when
shes off on a mating flight? it occurs to me as well that princesses must
surely do a bit of hanging around outside before they go off or they'd be
very hard put to find their way back...
anyway, seems like all i can do with this hive currently is leave it
alone. if they swarm they swarm, & if they don't have a laying queen in a
month or so i'll join them to the new colony, assuming one of their queens
makes it. but the trouble with being all hands off is, i don't know whats
actually happened & am basically guessing, which is why i wondered if
anyone else could shed any light?
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