k in the spring when bees are building up strong could this work to stop swarming .people do walk away spilts right well could not i just take out the queen put her in a cage then back in thr same hive keep her in there for two weeks then let her out.. that would put the house bees to work. on makeing honey instead of feeding brood .and stop a swarm .will that work????
Not a great idea in my opinion. The bees won't set to making more honey they'll start making queen cells. Walk away splits are also a sure way to get inferior queens.
caging the queen was a thing folks used to do. the hive did not make queen cells because the queen was still there. the problem is that you will end up with numbers down and that's not good for honey production or hive survival.
the success of walk away splits, or requeening from your own stock depends on resources and available genetics. there are some who will tell you that raising your own queens will give you inferior stock. i have not found that to be true, but i have enough hives to get lots of drone choices and if you do it early when there is good pollen and nectar, your odds of getting a good queen are high.
buying and requeening can be difficult, but raising your own has risks. swallows tend to eat my virgin queens so i have to keep a really close eye on things.
i have a hive that i want to raise queens. rather than splitting the hive, i am going to see if i can slip an empty shallow between the deeps with an excluder over it. my hope is that the upper box will pop out some queen cells for me. i would not do this with any old hive, but this hive seems to like to make queens cells anyway......we'll see how it works out :-)
I agree with Kathyp. You do not want to slow your brood rearing by isolating the queen.
You may not get any honey from a split or the mother colony, but that is the way to go for colony increase.
On the other hand, if you have a super duper colony, say 3 deep brood boxes and a super nectar flow, You could take the queen and start another colony with a couple frames of brood. You would have to make sure you went in about 10 days later and remove "ALL" queen cells.
Once the flow is over give them a new queen. Once they run out of anything to make a queen cell from they will give more time to collecting nectar. The only draw back to this method is risking the chance of egg laying workers developing.
I have never had the unlucky luck of laying workers. Had one colony queen less for 41 days once.
Another colony queen less for 4 weeks did produce a large amount of honey, but no more than a good queen right colony that was super strong.
The first part of the bottom line, unless you want to increase your colony numbers, I would leave the queen in, give them plenty room, this is the part where you have to stay ahead of them. Once you loose the lead you will not get it back. With a good colony and a good nectar flow you will get the honey.
The second part of the bottom line is, some years no matter what you do or fail to do,you may not get any honey.
Been there done that. :)doak
Every hive is different, there are many variables. That said, in some instances you might cage a queen say, 1 week before a good nectar flow. When you release the queen after 2 weeks, the nectar flow is started and the queen has been off laying long enough so that she'll take time to get back in the groove of full laying again. You will have given at least a 2 week period and probably closer to 3 weeks of broodlessness which is a way of helping cut back on varroa mite populations in the hive. You've also created a condition of less brood as nectar flow starts so with a strong hive you might get more honey stored instead of nectar fed to brood. And also, with the interruption of brood rearing for 2 to 3 weeks you have also helped to reduce swarming tendencies of strong over wintered hives.
Disclaimer... I've not done this particular maneuver myself but have read of others doing this and other similar things as IPM and to increase honey yields.
It's all in the timing. If you cage the queen two weeks before the flow, the larvae they would have been caring for probably wouldn't have helped with the harvest (depending on the length of flow where you live) so it wouldn't hurt production. But then again, they may not be thinking about swarming at that time anyway... Caging her any other time than two weeks before or shortly after the start of the flow is probably just setting them back.
The best swarm control is to keep the brood nest open. You want a lot of bees going into the flow. If you just want to set them back, then put the queen on a frame of brood and a frame of honey in a nuc and let them raise a new queen. You're hive will get requeened, and you'll get a nuc started...
e. i would not do this with any old hive, but this hive seems to like to make queens cells anyway......we'll see how it works out
This means your are selecting genes that will perpetuate swarming.