r/Beekeeping Wiki

The Swarm Impulse

Understanding why colonies want to swarm

Introduction

Swarming is a natural urge that colonies have to reproduce. Swarming is, contrary to popular belief, not an inherently bad thing. However, it can become a nuisance for your neighbors and nearby people when you let your colonies swarm repeatedly. Specifically in urban areas, we strongly recommend managing swarm impulses, as not only does the date of the swarm cause problems in terms of people feeling like they can go outside but also when the swarm finds a new place to set up shop - if you live in an urban environment, that shop is likely to be a chimney, roof cavity, floor cavity, wall cavity… the bees aren’t fussy.

The reason colonies want to swarm is simple: Reproduction. Bees, like all animals, have to reproduce to maintain their populations. It’s normal for a healthy colony to want to swarm once year at minimum, and depending on your specific genetics, this can be higher. Depending on the type of swarm control you do, this can push this up or down too.

What Drives Swarming?

Whilst swarming is a natural reproductive process of a colony, there are certain drivers that can increase the rate at which a colony will swarm, or even just out right force them to swarm. These include:

The list goes on, and the decision making is not fully understood - but this is the foundation of swarming impulse. Importantly: Swarming is not just space management.

If these conditions are all acceptable to the colony, they will want to swarm. When these fundamental conditions change, the colony will change it’s mind. For example: If the colony is in the middle of swarm prep, and they have cells drawn down and even capped over but the weather is consistenly raining non-stop, they will abort the cells and hold off.

The Swarm Triangle

Ontop of above drivers, there are also pre-requisites to swarming. These are:

This is known as the “swarm triangle”, and is what all swarm control methods are based upon. A complete triangle is a recipe for a swarm. Imagine this like so:

Image showing the 3 prerequisites as a triangle

Remove one of these from a colony, and you remove the colony’s drive to swarm, as their swarm triangle is incomplete.

Important: Deleting queen cells will not prevent swarming. A swarm will still leave once a virgin emerges. This also applies to clipped queens.

Removing Brood & Nurses

Usually, removing brood comes hand in hand with removing nurses. Nurses will spend all of their time tending to frames of open brood, so by moving open brood, you inherently move nurses. Some manipulations such as “queenless” splits rely on this by removing all the bees from the frames, and then giving nurses some time to find their way back to the open brood. Knowing how to remove nurses from a colony without finding a queen can come in superbly useful so we’ll cover it here in a moment.

Removing The Queen

This is as easy as it sounds. The colony wants to swarm with a queen, obviously. Removing her from a colony renders them queenless and reverts them back to emergency cell raising. Almost all swarm control methods rely on emergency response for performing succesful swarm control.

But I Can’t Find Her

Don’t worry - there’s a manipulation for this.

You’ll need:

The method:

  1. Go to the hive
  2. Remove the lid, and place it upside down on the floor
  3. Remove the old body from the floor and set it inside the lid
  4. Place the new brood body on the old floor
  5. Shake frames one by one into the new brood body
  6. Brush any extra bees off the frames
  7. Stack the frames in the right order next to the brood body
  8. Once all the bees are shaken into the hive, check the lid for any stagglers. Knock them in too
  9. Place the queen excluder on the hive
  10. Place the old brood body ontop of the excluder
  11. Add all the frames back in the right order
  12. Close the hive

Over the next $notLong, nurses will migrate up through the hive onto the brood to tend to it. The queen, however, will be stuck below the queen excluder in the bottom half of the stack. Thus, you have separated the queen from the nurses/brood. You don’t need to see her - you know she’s in there. You can now use this as the basis for the next part of your manipulation, if your manipulation involves removing brood from a queenright colony (see, Demaree, Pagden, Vertical Splits, etc)

Removing Flying Bees

(This is also covered on our 3 Feet or 3 Miles page)

When flying bees are coming and going from a hive, they don’t orient themselves every time they leave the hive. They only do so a handful of times in their life. Imagine a scenario where you are in your house, and you leave for the first time - when you do, you go for a look around to make sure you know where the house is, what street it’s on, and what number it is. Then, whenever you leave the house, you do so blindfolded. You run off in a particular direction, take your blindfold off, collect your pollen, and then walk home. Lets say someone drugs you and moves you to another house… the next morning you wake up blindfolded, you run out of the house, blindfold off, grab pollen, come home. Where do you end up? Not at the house you left, but at the place you know is home.

This is essentially how workers work. They don’t check that the hive they are leaving is the one they think is home. They simply leave, go forage, and come to where they know is home.

As such, if you want to remove flying bees from a hive, just move the hive. The flying bees will leave of their own volition.

Summary: