There are only a handful of things more distressful to a beekeeper than opening a hive for an inspection (or worse, to take a Nuc) and find the gals in full blown swarm prep mode! It has happened so often to me that I have grown use to the pain and actually simply expect it on many of my strongest hives each Spring.

Although, there are many documented methods of swarm prevention (and I believe that I have tried them all), it is my experience that you can rarely stop a hive that is set on swarming. So, I have mostly given up on fighting Mother Nature. Since I do believe that there are some queens that will not swarm if given enough space (and with population reduction through taking Nucs), I do make sure that all hives have at least one honey super by mid-March. Now that we are in April, most of my hives have 2 honey supers (well, at least the ones that have started to make good work on the original.) The hives that really go crazy (gang busters is a word I sometimes use), I simply focus on pulling as many Nucs off of them as possible, before the old gal heads off to my neighbor’s soffit:)

And so I had my first “scenario” on Saturday, when I went in to take a Nuc off of a hive that had really been rolling since mid-March (I already had two Nucs from the hive going along well.) I found the White queen, along with several capped or partially capped queen cells. In the past, I have played with taking the queen from the hive and all sorts of other things, but this time, I simply bid her farewell and good luck on her future journey, and placed her back in the hive.

But, before I did that, I located two confirmed queen cells in good shape (and in a position where there was no chance that I could harm them in my misadventures) and placed those frames aside – they were to go back in the hive and be the new queen for this great hive, when it swarmed. I then located queen cells on other frames and created two Nucs, shaking a lot of bees into both (I know a bunch were prepping for a little journey out into the hinterlands with my wayward white queen, so I got as many as I could.) At this point, I did something a bit different than I have done in the past.

For years, I create a Nuc and simply set it up in the same yard as the parent hive. I do that to this day and it works just fine. Some Nucs are no more than 5 feet from the parent hive. But, I have also discovered (over the years) that when I take a Nuc from a hive in Swarm Prep mode, I occasionally come back in two weeks to find the Nuc completely empty. Not a single bee. This seems to ONLY happen with Nucs from hives in swarm prep mode. It seems logical to me that somehow these bees hear their brethren issue a swarm and they simply go with it, leaving the Nuc empty! So, on Saturday, I actually sealed up both new Nucs and moved them a couple of miles down the road, to a different apiary. We shall see how this works. It can’t be worse than before (I hope!)