If you have LOST a swarm from one of your colonies, you can't say anything GOOD
about swarming. If you have just retrieved a swarm that was found hanging in a tree
near the county police department, you can't say anything BAD about swarming.
Bees swarmed back in the Garden of Eden as their way of reproduction and making
new homes over the vast expanse of the whole world; and they HAVE NO CHANGED THEIR
PROGRAM ONE IOTA! The will still be doing the same in the future unless the are made
extinct by Americans who have seen too many Hollywoodized "killer bee" movies, and
self-declared themselves, their children, and even their pet dog ALLERGIC to bee stings.
If you have carefully followed, not only, my PINK PAGES, but the findings of almost
every bee researcher or scientist about the management techniques of swarm prevention,
your bees will not swarm very often, but rather always make a fine honey crop. The
cardinal points of swarm prevention are:
Prevent brood nest congestion by early spring reversing of brood bodies;
Have a queen less than 1 year old; and
have EXCESS supers of drawn comb in place on the colony just prior to the beginning of the major nectar flow (about April 15th for Montgomery County, MD).
Those in doubt of
these 3 steps should read pages 618 and 623 of the 1992 Extensively Revised Edition
of The Hive and Honey Bee. Since that was written, researchers, scientists, and even
commercial honey producers now favor YEARLY requeening instead of requeening every
two years. This is not the time or place to debate the value of requeening; but if you
allow your bees to re-queen themselves, in these times of lack of feral bees and hence
few drones around, your bees are probably badly inbred with your own drones which can
lead to various undesirable traits like poor honey production, mean and nasty, or just
"sickly". This is one of the reasons that those bee breeders that possess great
knowledge and integrity swap queens annually with other breeders in order to produce drones
away from their own line and hence reduce inbreeding.
Much to my dismay, I have found that most beeHAVERS and some beeKEEPERS are NOT
aware of the fact that most swarms are headed by an old queen who probably will be
superseded in a few months after swarming or die during the coming winter. In nature,
only a few swarms survive and are still alive a year later. Perhaps this is nature's way
of preventing inbreeding. Further, although heavily debated, the quality of queens
resulting from supersedure of the old queen is highly questioned.
However, there is much GOOD that can be attributed to a new swarm. A captured
swarm is placed in a hive consisting only of ten frames of foundation. Since the life
expectancy of a bee during flying weather is a mere 6 weeks, this means that more
than half of all the swarm bees are going to be dead before the first new worker bee
emerges from her 21 day (3 week) gestation period. The queen can't lay eggs on foundation
until the bees draw that foundation into comb, and the bees need lots of nectar in
great haste to acquire the energy to produce the beeswax scales to build comb. Further,
comb has to be build to hold the nectar that is collected. The POINT is: A swarm of
bees is DESPERATE and in great hurry to draw foundation and build comb, and works
"overtime" to find nectar to accomplish this. Hence, a swarm is extremely valuable
to get frames of foundation drawn into drawn comb that you can use in your other bee
colonies; and you can destroy the bees and queen when they finish "their job" of drawing
foundation unless you want another colony of bees for yourself.
Another value of a swarm is as a gift to someone who might be interested in beekeeping.
That is exactly how Master Beekeeper Ann Harman got started in beekeeping
in the late 70's, and today, she is an international consultant in beekeeping. I often
use a caught swarm in observation hives rather than deplete my honey production
colonies. Of course, the value of transferring frames of brood from a hive of swarm
bees to one of your weak colonies is obvious. If you want to experiment, try a new
idea, prove some management technique, or even do something "forbidden", do any of
these things with a swarm rather than with your own "pedigreed" valuable bees. One
might remember the old adage: Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Acquiring a swarm
of bees that did not come from your colonies is a very valuable asset for you that can
have lots of different uses, some of which will help your own colonies and others of
which might help your learning of better beekeeping. Make an effort to catch every
swarm possible as it can serve beekeeping in so many valued ways when in the hands
of a beekeeper, whereas its chances of feral survival are next to zero due to the
universal presence of mites over the entire U. S.
Unfortunately, the great majority of all beekeepers, both novice and experienced,
have accepted swarming as "one of those surprise unfortunate events in beekeeping
that is very difficult to prevent"; and they are WRONG! Swarming is NOT a surprise
to a beekeeper who is aware of the recent findings of researchers about swarming
and uses the bee management techniques recommended by those researchers, thereby
PREVENTING most swarms! Yes, there are still some people who practice cutting out
swarm cells and clipping of a queen's wings as swarm prevention techniques; and these
systems are as obsolete as women's corsets, an Underwood #5 typewriter, or a car with
a manual choke. Rather than spending their time "bitching and complaining", they should
spend their time LEARNING swarm prevention techniques of our new 21st century.
There are so many things that beekeepers either don't know about swarming, or
believe in the many "old wive's tales", or use anthropomorphic thinking to explain why
their bees swarmed. The result is that these people lose swarms, fail to produce much
honey, and pass on their lack of bee knowledge to other people. The errors of our honey
bee thinking of 50 years ago have grossly come to light in the past 20 years due to the
increased vigor of research by bee scientists to solve problems caused by appearance
of mites, small hive beetles, resistant AFB, Africanized bees, etc. Now, armed with
these new findings, much of our older thinking about swarming can be discarded and
replaced with new techniques that have been developed due to the new findings. For
example, queens do NOT decide to swarm, but it is her daughters, the worker bees, that
make the decision to swarm, stop feeding the queen so she can reduce weight in order
to fly, prepare swarm cells, force the queen to lay in the cell, prepare drone size cells
for drones to mate with a new virgin queen, partially suspend field foraging for nectar, send
out scouts looking for possible new home sites, prevent the old queen from destroying
the new swarm cells, and a dozen other swarm preparations. These are programs started
2-3 weeks in advance of the swarm issuance, and 2-3 weeks is NOT some sudden action
of the bees that many people think is what happens about the act of swarming. Now, we
know that clipping a queen's wings will NOT prevent swarming, because the bees will
kill their mother and swarm with the first virgin queen that emerges. In bygone days
we used to think that swarms were disease free, but now we know that they carry
large loads of mites with them to new homes and will probably die shortly because they
are no longer treated for mites. This new research has proved that a queen bee makes
almost NO decisions about the affairs of the colony, and about 95% of ALL decisions
are made by the worker bees based upon the circumstances found within the colony at
specific times. All of this is thoroughly discussed in many recent books as well as my
PINK PAGES, but many beekeepers just cannot abandon the beliefs of the "old timers", and
accept the findings of recent scientific research. As a former Manhattan Project scientist,
no wonder we kept the building of atom bombs so secret, because had we not, the
American people surely could not be convinced of atom energy without SEEING IT IN USE
and the voters might have failed to re-elect President Roosevelt in 1944. By the way,
not even Vice President Harry Truman knew a single thing about the Manhattan Project
until a few hours after he was sworn in as the new President after the sudden death of
Roosevelt. I was "locked-in" at Oak Ridge National Laboratory developing methods to
purify Uranium 235 then, along with 75,000 other workers who were UNKNOWN to Truman,
most senators and congressmen, and ALL of the American public. It is "high time" that
you avail yourself to the literature and talks about the new advanced findings of
bee research over the past 20 years if you are to upgrade your status of beeHAVER to
beeKEEPER, not to mention the appreciation of the real JOYS OF BEEKEEPING.
I have a new, great big, golden queen now in my apiary. The telephone rang on late
Monday afternoon, April 16th from a lady in Alexandria, VA asking me if I could PLEASE
"come and remove a swarm of bees clustered on her chain link yard fence before they
stung somebody?". No longer can I do this since being disabled by strokes, but my eldest
son "volunteered" to take my electric vacuum swarm retriever and drive to Alexandria
that night and get them. He brought home a fine 4 pound swarm, and I installed them on
10 sheets of foundation the next day. Upon inspection on Friday, April 27th, I found a
big golden queen who has layed some brood on 3 frames and foundation drawn on a total
of 7 frames filled with sugar syrup that I have been feeding, and all of this just 10
days after I installed them and we have had freezing weather at night. By the way, since
I will not remove any honey from them this year, I have Apistan strips in the hive now.
Why Use MARKED Queens?
Be Smart - Not Stubborn - Read
For centuries, most people thought that all bees were the same, and the only things
they really knew about bees were they STUNG and MADE HONEY. It was not until the Italian
race of bees was imported to the U.S. in 1856 and people saw its "golden" color did they
recognize that this honey bee was different than the dull brown old English bee that had
been brought to this country from England by the first settlers in Virginia and Massachusetts.
About the time that the Wright brothers flew the first airplane and Henry Ford
made his first car, the gentle, dark Carniolan bee and the dark, propolis collecting
Caucasian bee were introduced into the U. S. In the early part of the 20th century, in
efforts to breed a "better" bee (better honey producer, more gentle, disease resistant,
brighter colors, and superior wintering ability) ALL the races were cross bred, out
crossed, in crossed, as well as crossed OFF in breeding of various hybrids like Buckfast,
Midnite, Starline and Double Hybrid. Now 100 years later, we know that there is no such
thing as the "BEST" bee, and that a well bred Italian or a well bred Carniolan bee is the
most successful of bees the world over. Further, bee scientists have shown that when
bee races or bee stocks are crossed, the progeny almost always lose their good points
and demonstrate undesirable points. During the past 10 years, the entry of the
Africanized Honey Bee (killer bee) into the U. S. has convinced almost everyone that
honey bees are different and are "not all the same".
If you are truly honest with yourself (not me), you have to admit that it is very
difficult to swear that a queen bee that is in your colony today is the same queen that
was present 6 months ago or a year ago, UNLESS SHE IS SOMEHOW MARKED. In addition,
if you have several colonies, all with unmarked queens, how old is the queen in Hive A,
how old is the queen in Hive B, in C, in D, and in E? If you don't know the age of your
queens, no wonder that they SWARM, since bee scientists now state that queens
over a year old are very likely to swarm because they have lost the ability to produce
enough queen pheromone to inhibit swarming.
Lastly, in the event of the contested ownership of a swarm, surely a marked queen
of known color mark is a strong point for the rightful owner.
Although color selection of the mark is not caste in stone, there is an International
Color Code for Queens that is widely used:
Year Ending Digit
Color
0 or 5
Blue
1 or 6
White
2 or 7
Yellow
3 or 8
Red
4 or 9
Green
When I find an unmarked queen in a colony, I mark her light gray or silver to indicate to
me that she has to be replaced by a pedigreed queen and the marking makes her easier to
locate.
Marking queens yourself is easy, or you can pay the queen breeder to do it for you at
a cost of about $1. Betterbee Company makes a fine queen holder for marking that costs
less than $5 and prevents injuring a queen. Don't use some "junk" like typing WipeOut,
fingernail polish, or water base paint for marking material. Fast drying model airplane
paint in hundreds of colors is sold in felt tip marking pens made by TESTORS, and can
be found in any hobby store and some hardware stores. One pen will mark thousands of
queens with one color, so 5 pens with 5 colors should last you a lifetime.
Protect your race of bees by MARKING your queen so you are sure that she is the
queen that you purchased as a pedigreed race, and not the result of one of your virgin
queens being bred by all the boys on the "back street". Then your Carniolans will be
Carniolan gentle, and your Italians will be fine comb builders that is an Italian trait.
Further, if you need proof yourself, you will find that colonies headed by real young
queens rarely swarm, whereas colonies with 2 year old queens swarm easily, but you
must have MARKED queens to know the age of the queen.
This is all part of being a beeKEEPER instead of being a beeHAVER! Stop your bitching
and put into practice what you have been taught.
The Governor of Maryland to Honor George Imirie
In mid April, a telephone call from the Governor's Office informed me that I had
been selected for a special award for my Volunteer work in Beekeeping and a following
letter would explain more. The letter is reprinted on the other side of this page. I
could not imagine who had nominated me, nor how a ultra conservative Republican
could be honored by a Democratic Governor. Upon asking many questions of the Governor's
staff, I finally learned that the Executive Director of the Montgomery County Fair,
JoAnne Leatherman, had nominated me.
I expect ALL of you to help me THANK JoAnne for this honor by attending and
participating in the LARGEST AGRICULTURAL FAIR EAST OF THE MISSISSIPPI this year from
Friday, August 10th through Saturday, August 18th. We want a HUGE number of entries
of honey and related beekeeping items from you so you can win huge cash prizes and
beautiful ribbons. The MCBA will have quite a display of live bees, extractor, bee hives,
video bee films, and photographs at our booth in Old MacDonald's Barn all headed by
Master Beekeeper Barry Thompson. Don't say "no" to Barry when he asks you for help at
the FAIR. I will be putting on FOUR demonstrations each day in a new wider aperature
screened cage of opening bee hives, showing the queen, EXPLAINING THE VALUE OF BEES
TO OUR HUMAN FOOD SUPPLY, while I wear NO VEIL and work in a Tee Shirt and Shorts.
Next door in George's Honey House is the sale of many flavors, colors, and quantities
of honey, comb honey, creamed honey all done by my wife, sons, and daughter-in-law.
George Imirie
Certified EAS Master Beekeeper
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