Welcome to White City

One of the most important aspects of bee keeping is swarm control. Left to their own devices, a honey bee colony will pack its bags and leave in search of a new home. What's left behind is the young non-flying bees, the brood of eggs and larvae and hopefully a shiny new queen. They're left to carry on the old colony while the old queen and the flying bees set up someplace new. While it's an incredible feat of nature, it's a problem for the bee keeper. For a start, he's just lost half his bees, and secondly, swarms seem to find all manner of inappropriate places to set up home. Chimneys, Sheds, caravans, letter boxes, etc all seem great to a bee, not so great for us. Local bee groups have 'swarm lists'. People who go out and catch swarms and re home them somewhere more suitable. IE, in the swarm catcher's apiary! Free bees for those who dare. So to prevent all this trouble, throughout the swarm season of May to August, beekeepers have to check their hives once a week to look for signs of swarm preparation - queen cells around the edge of the frames. So, last Sunday, I was a bit overdue on a hive inspection. I found and removed several queen cells from the brood nest. All but one sealed, which means our Doris bees were packing their bags. Urgent action required.

Here's what you have to do. The idea is to fool the bees into thinking they've already swarmed. So you set up a new hive 2 metres or more from the old hive. You put the brood box from the old hive into the new one, and transfer a frame with the queen into a new brood box in the old hive. You then split the honey stores between the hives. Bees, you see, have a better navigation system than GPS. They know where the hive is to within a meter. All the flying bees go to the old hive where they find a lot less brood, a lot less honey and an awful lot of comb to build. They think they've already swarmed. Time to get on with building honeycomb!

Meanwhile in the old brood box on the new site (still with me?) the young non flying bees suddenly find they have no queen and raise a new one from the larvae already in the brood. When the young bees go on their first flight, they orientate themselves to the new site, not knowing that they were born next door.

In theory, you soon have 2 colonies that aren't in a swarmy state of mind at all. And hopefully that's what we have here. The problem was we didn't have a spare hive. A mad dash over to the north coast yesterday, secured a tatty old pre-bee'd hive, but only after paying way too much money. Swarm season is a seller's market... A few hours of work got it clean and disinfected. A slightly stressful hour of bee moving and I'm happy to say, in the foreground here, we have our second hive. We're calling it 'White City'. 'Dorisville', our first hive, is in the distance. Two hives, lots of bees, fingers crossed!

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