1. Give Your Bees Room:

One of the easiest and best ways to prevent swarming is to make sure your bees have enough room.  This is just good management.  If your bees don’t have room to store honey, then you will lose that honey.  If the queen does not have room to lay eggs, then you will not have as many worker bees.  Your colony will not make as much honey as it could.

Most beekeepers in the Solomon Islands use two boxes in their hives.  One box is for brood and one for honey.  This works fine, but you must:

• check your hives regularly.
• harvest the honey before the honey box is completely full.
• give the empty frames back to the hive quickly.
• put some of the full frames from the brood box, up into the honey box. Put some empty frames from the honey box back into the brood box when the brood box is full.
• give the bees more room by giving them a 3^rd box . Put this box in between the brood box and the honey box.

2. Re-queen:

Replacing your queens every year is another way to prevent swarming.  Young queens usually do not swarm.  You will learn how to re-queen in topic 14.

3. Splitting:

One way to prevent swarming is to split your strong hives before they swarm.  Use method 2 from Topic 13 and remove the old queen from the hive.  Put her in the new hive or nuc, and leave the old hive to raise a new queen.

4. Artificial Swarming:

If you see capped swarm cells in your hive, and your queen has stopped laying eggs, then she has already decided to swarm and there is not much you can do to stop it.  The best thing then is to help your bees swarm so you do not lose them.

1. Set up a brood box on a base and hive stand with frames of mostly foundation. (Swarming bees make plenty of wax)
2. Find the queen and put her and the frame she is on into the middle of the new brood box.  Make sure there are no queen cells on this frame.
3. Take out half of the frames from the old hive and shake or brush the bees from these frames into the new hive.
4. Put these frames back in the old hive.
5. Destroy all but the biggest and best swarm cells in the old hive.  Leave the old hive to raise a new queen from these swarm cells.

Your old queen and half of your worker bees now have what they wanted, a new home with lots of room.  You now have two hives instead of one.  Leave the hives to grow strong.

Or

With both 3 and 4, (splitting or artificial swarming), you can wait until the new queen has started to lay eggs, kill the old queen, and unite the two hives with newspaper (Topic 15 Uniting). You are then left with a very strong hive and a young queen.

5. Destroy the Swarm Cells:

Another way to prevent swarming is to regularly inspect your hives and destroy any swarm cells you see.  This will stop your bees from swarming until they start more swarm cells.  You need to check at least once every week.  Do not wait any longer than that.  Your hive may have swarmed. This method is risky.  You may destroy the swarm cells and your bees swarm anyway.  Then your old hive is left without a new queen.  If the swarm cells are capped and the old queen has stopped laying eggs, do not destroy the swarm cells.  It is too late to stop the bees from leaving using this method.

You may make an artificial swarm – Method 4.

Note: Swarm cells produce very good queens.  You should be ready to use these swarm cells when you see them.  Write down which of your hives needs a new queen, and when swarming season comes you can cut out these swarm cells or take the frame with the swarm cells and use it to re-queen (Topic 14) the hives that you have identified.  You can also put capped swarm cells into splits or nucs.