Episode 60: April Q&A

Another week another challenge here in Norfolk. I’ve managed to tweak my recurring back problem again and that’s causing some fun issues for me, particularly putting my socks on, however, it happened after we moved around 50 of our colonies to the Oil Seed Rape pollination and I think it was probably just tiredness and no doubt laziness that caused it so I’m resting up for a few days and hopefully it will be fine. I really must look into some lifting gear to help move hives around more easily, perhaps that will be something I can report back on in a later podcast.

So this week is my regular Questions and Answers session, thank you to everyone over on my patreon page for submitting some really great questions for this month, and there’s lots of them so let’s get stuck into them straight away. First up with have a question from Ben Hoen, Hi Ben, thanks for the question.

Ben asks:

I have heard the reversing deeps (in a 2-deep 10-frame configuration) can help reduce swarm tendencies.  True?  If so, when's a good time to do that? And any advice on how best to do it and what to watch out for?

Context: I have 2 very strong hives (out of three) coming out of winter (they have 8 frames wide of bees in the top box).  My concern is that they might not fill up the lower box and think they are out of space.  One hive is not using the lower entrance at all currently.  Both are 2 weeks into drone rearing and still appear to be fairly light when hefting them.  I heard that by reversing the boxes you can encourage them to build up, filling up the less-full what would then be the upper box (after reversing it from its lower position), and therefore discourage swarming.

What do you think?

Hi Ben, I think you have almost answered the question for me. I’ve heard beekeepers talk about this as well although I’ve never practiced it myself. I think a lot depends on the type of bees you have and whether they fill the brood boxes fully or if there is additional available space that the bees can utilise. I would also say that a lot depends on your reasons for keeping the bees in a double brood box set up. For me, the vast majority of my bees are very happy in a single commercial brood box and I only double up if I intend splitting at some point during that season.

Focussing on your specific question and I’m in agreement with your comments, I suspect it may help with swarming if the bees have plenty of space in the bottom box because the brood nest will naturally move up into the top box and expand there, this will leave the bottom box relatively empty with stores in just some of the frames, the rest being put above the queen excluder in honey boxes or supers. By reversing the boxes you immediately give the brood area more space and the queen can move up and continue to lay in the newly available cells above. I suspect that’s the reason people say it can help reduce swarming. I hope that helps Ben.

Next up is a question from Charlie Edge

Charlie asks;

when would be the earliest you would commence splitting? 

Also if you did an artificial swarm is there anything wrong with splitting the queen cells down into 2/3frame nucs instead of leaving 1 cell in the original brood box? 

Hi Charlie,
 That’s such a good question and perfectly timed for a lot of beginner beekeepers out there. Unless you have a specific set up for breeding and rearing bees I would say wait wait wait.

So many beekeepers attempt to split colonies way too early and they get set back by cold weather which almost seems to cause a bigger delay that if they’d left them a month before splitting. Smaller colonies, that’s the splits you’ve made, have to work so much harder than full sized colonies at regulating colony temperature and this early in the Spring the weather fluctuates so much that small splits can get dangerously cold at night, so my advice is to wait until t