Demareeing
Artificial Swarming
Remove a Nucleus
Snelgrove Method
Horsley Method
Pagden Method
Queen Clipping
Cutting out Queencells
Queen Includer
Swarm Catchers
Simmins' Method
Hall Method
Stuart's Method
Peck Method
Hawkins' Method
Rauchfuss Method
De-Queening
Shook Swarming
Doolittle Method
Breeding Selection
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Swarm Control of Honey Bee Colonies
Swarm control management of honey bee colonies to reduce the causes of swarming and thus the likelihood or chance of swarms occurring.
Swarming of bees is a natural part of the colony's life cycle... Almost half of the worker bees and maybe a few drones, leave the parent hive after having starved the old queen to stop her laying and reduce her weight. The old queen may have to be goaded into flight by harassing workers.
The departing swarm leaves behind a ripe queen cell that will hatch into a virgin queen, which after mating will replace the swarm queen as the egg layer. This process creates two colonies, one of which has very few resources and so is vulnerable, but the colony that remains is also vulnerable as it's virgin has to get mated to be able to carry on.
In order to reduce swarming it is important that the beekeeper is aware of it's many causes and can take action when these stimuli are noticed.
Swarming is an alarming event to the general public, often with thousands of bees in the air and darkening the sky. It is no small wonder that non-beekeepers are frightened, as there is little in the education system that familiarises everybody with honey bees, so that they will not be alarmed when an odd swarm does occur.
For this reason it is important for beekeepers to take particular care to reduce the chances of swarms issuing from their hives and to take action to collect swarms that occur in their own neighbourhood, whether or not the came from their own hives.
The basic idea of swarm control is very simple indeed... Separate the queen and the brood. However there are a multitude of ways of achieving this and some of these methods are still known by the names of the individuals that invented or popularised the methods.
I have used various methods and I have tried out almost all of the methods in the index at left. The methods that I have been most comfortable with are:- artificial swarming, Demaree, removing a nucleus and selection of non swarmy strains.
