Oh joy – swarm season is here. The first swarm I heard of happened in mid-April, but we’re into the thick of it now. So keep an eye on your hives!! Crowding is almost always the main issue, and with a good nectar flow right now and your queens laying prodigiously, the space you thought you had in your hive can disappear pretty darned fast. And it’s not uncommon for a hive to swarm because it has become “honey bound” – the open frames get filled with nectar, so there’s no room for brood.
If you have 5-6 frames filled with nectar, pollen and brood, you need to step in quickly. Check your brood boxes; if the lower one is empty and the upper one(s) filled, consider reversing the order by putting the full one on the bottom, emptier one above. If all your boxes are filling up, add another one – or two! If you have room for another brood box, add it and move some frames of brood up into it to get the bees and queen to pay attention to it. A queen will not necessarily climb across a full box to get to an upper empty one without some enticement! And if you do move brood frames, put those frames in the same orientation and order they had in the source box. If you have enough brood boxes, put on a honey super and move some filled honey frame from the box below up into the new one, and move the displaced empty frames down; this makes space below and again encourages the bees to move up and use the new box. Some beekeepers like to use queen excluders (I do) so they can more comfortably work in the supers without worrying (much) about the queen being there. Others disparage queen excluders, calling them “honey excluders”, but I’ve harvested 40 lbs of honey from hives with excluders. Beekeepers! Put two in a room and you’ll get at least three opinions…
And to be safe, you need to go into your hive every 5 days or so right now – those bees can form queen cells very, very quickly!!! So – good luck!! But also stayed prepared. Have the equipment for an extra hive ready to hand, in case you need to do an emergency split, or… retrieve your swarm…
We have some good items on this month’s agenda that I believe you will find very interesting, so I hope to see you there!
Our monthly meeting is this coming Thursday, May 8th 6:30-8:30 p.m.
- Venue: Central Saanich Seniors Citizens Association, 1229 Clarke Rd., Brentwood Bay
- Agenda:
- There will be no separate Beginners’ and Intermediates’ Corners this month
- 6:30 Full meeting upstairs
- Swarms and splits – Don L
- Outyard update – Janet F
There is a planned work party for the JAM yards June 8th. If you wish to participate, contact our Outyard Manager, Janet Fontaine, at outyards@capitalregionbeekeepers.ca. Through their work equity, participants will be guaranteed three spots in any of the outyards; if demand exceeds available space in either the work party or outyards, spots will be determined by lottery. - Hive Survival Survey Results – Katrina J
- Demaree Method of Swarm Control (If time) – Bill C
- Club Business
- Motion to return annual dues to $32. A vote at the last meeting raised the annual dues to $35 but a question was raised about necessity. Further evaluation of our finances shows that we can keep the dues at $32. A change of dues requires a vote of the membership.
- Insurance for the outyards