In one of my hives today I found four queen cells. One closed rest with larvas. It is strong family, a lot of brood, they are still in expansion period. The queen is less than one year old and lays nicely. Are they able to recognize that she has trimmed wing and will not be able to fly with the future swarm?
No. They will still try to swarm without her. Eventually leaving with a virgin queen if necessary. You might find her crawling in the grass after an unsuccessful attempt. It's a good time to split the colony and use the queen cells in the queenless half.
Supercedure can happen for a variety of reasons:
Queen not healthy
Hive is outgrowing space
The bees are not happy with the queen for some unknown reason
Queen is near the end of her life
Just because
and there are other reasons others can post.
Sometimes the bees will make queen cells and then will kill them before they hatch or the queen will kill the virgin queens.
I had 6 queen cells on a hive a one time with a good queen. It never swarmed and there was no supercedure. I also moved it from a nuc to a deep when I saw the cells.
Sincerely,
Brendhan
It seems that hive want to swarm normally. You should stop that at once. Move the hive 10 feet and put empty hive with foundation in old site. Give one brood frame and old queen in hive. Bees fly themselves to new hive and the rest remain in brood hive.
After a week foundations are build and swarm fever is away. When main honey flow begins you should put hive halves together. Otherwise you do not get honey from halves. When hive is eager to sawrm, you should buy a new queen no matter how good your queens are now. Swarming is the worst thing what I want in bee stock. It destroyes honey yield.
Where are the cells?
Swarm cells are usually on the bottoms of the frames. Supercedure cells are usually in the middle of the frame.
> How crowded is the hive?
This is a sure fire way to cause swarming.
> Is there space for the queen to lay?
If you don't prevent the brood nest from getting filled with honey and pollen, and if they have a good supply of bees and stores, they will swarm.
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesswarmcontrol.htm
I checked all hive. There were just four in the middle of the frames, the capped one was in on the side between comb and frame, so look like supercedure. She still has some room, the hive is on two deeps and one shallow. And there is not much nectar in the brood chamber. That what confuses me. They do not look like ready for swarming, just like they wanted to change the queen.
we put our hives in on may 23 and in the italian hive we have multiple supersedure cells. we decided to leave 'em be.
any comments?
>we have multiple supersedure cells. we decided to leave 'em be.
I always do for emergency or supercedure cells.