Saturday, May 19, 2012

How to Perform an Artificial Swarm

In this video the artificial swarm is discussed. For the first method the old colony is placed in a new site more than 4 feet away. He then took 3 frames with 2 or 3 queen cells on each and a new brood chamber into a new box put in the same location that the old box had been in before being moved. So when the field bees return to their location that used to have the old box, they find that their queen is gone but there are queen cells so they stay. You must eventually narrow the queen cells down to just one in each box so there are not secondary swarms. For honey production, you can combine the two colonies and keep just one queen.
The other method is to take a brood chamber full of foundations and put the chamber right on top of a strong hive, making sure there are no queen cells already existing in the hive. This means the whole hive can draw out the whole foundation and expand the colony. As soon as you find a queen cell in the new chamber you can split them.
Both methods seem quite reasonable especially since you do not need plenty of space such as a distance of three miles as seen in the last video. The second method seemed very easy and would be great for new apiaries to increase the hive size and apiary size.

No comments:

Post a Comment