June in Your Central Oregon Apiary

SNAP, and it’s Summer (well almost)  Lots of flowers blooming in town (weeds too 😊). We no longer have to have a coat with us “just in case”.  The bees are building up like crazy, and we’re getting swarm calls every 3 or 4 evenings.

WAIT, did I say swarm calls!?!?!?!?!  It is the middle of swarm season as you know.

As we all know swarms are the way for honey bee colonies to reproduce.  It’s natural, as they say.  There are two issues I’d like you to think about.

• 1.     Swarms DO (assuming they successfully raise and mate a new queen) provide a new, fresh queen, and a brood break which can help with Varroa management.  As well as, if you’re lucky, a second smaller colony.  But they do reduce the size of your colony by about ½ over the next several weeks to a month.
• 2.     Swarms can be a big nuisance to your neighbors.  One swarm every couple of years probably won’t be an issue, but if my hives are casting a swarm a week over the 6 weeks of swarm season, my neighbors will start (in my opinion probably justifiably) getting somewhat testy, which in the long run may cause me issues.

SO, this month is a great month for SWARM MITIGATION.  As stated above, swarming is natural.  That doesn’t mean we can’t work to mitigate the urge.  As stated last month, swarming has a couple of triggers and contributing factors.  Queen has no space to lay (brood chamber already full or backfilled with nectar), too many (bored?) nurse bees, older less productive queen, “swarmy” queen, general congestion in hive and hive entrance.  Mitigation involves “fixing” these issues.

IF they haven’t started preparing (swarm cells) you can either add another hive body (Langstroth) or move/remove the follower board (TBH), If the brood chamber is “honey bound” but there are empty frames with drawn comb on the outside, I like to checkerboard them throughout the brood chamber (Doesn’t work withy undrawn foundation as it’s not “ready to use”).  If you already have 2 hive bodies you can either add a super on top, or add a third hive body with some drawn comb between the two that are there.  All of these provide immediate space for egg laying.  You can also make an artificial swarm.  Moving the hive nearby, leaving a single hive body with 2 or 3 frames of brood and the queen and the rest empty drawn comb in the original position.  They will usually raise a new queen in the nearby double deep box and the single box with the old queen will have tons of space to lay.  Later you can keep two hives, or can pinch one of the queens and reunite the colonies.  There are a variety of other methods, Demaree, Snelgrove etc. that you can look up and try.  The main point is to stay ahead of your colony.

As the Spring progresses into Summer, start thinking MITES.  Your colonies are slowing down their increase but the mites are continuing to try to take over.  Do some counts, be proactive.  In your decision making, take into account the health of your colony, the temperature, whether/when your hive will be supered, the mite level.

Finally, I read a post by Jun Rule (I think) about native pollinators, which made me think (hard to do sometimes).  We need to remember that not only are our honeybees supported and cared for by us, and the other pollinators are somewhat ignored, but the two main things we can do to “save the bees” both Apis Mellifera and other native pollinators are to support habitat/forage, and to encourage minimal/smart/careful/legal use of pesticides.

Happy beekeeping