# are swarm traps part of swarm mangement?



## TalonRedding (Jul 19, 2013)

JustinH said:


> They say that part of being a responsible beekeeper is swarm management, especially if you live in a neighborhood (which I do). So I have some questions because this is my second year. I'm hoping that my slatted racks will help some. My first choice of swarm management is checker boarding. In additional to this, is it recommended to put out swarm traps? Should I have a trap for each colony? And if I put a swarm lure inside, will that smell entice a swarm that may not have wanted to swarm in the first place?
> 
> My third choice would be to make splits. But I don't want/can't afford any more colonies so if I do splits, I'll give the splits to members in my club.
> 
> ...


You need to understand why swarm management is necessary first of all. It's not only a safety concern in a neighborhood. it is also to maximize the honey crop. Basically, a swarmed colony=no honey crop. 
You are in your second year and are considering checkerboarding. More than likely you do not have enough drawn comb for checkerboarding to be successful unless you have come across a bunch of it from someone else or are recycling comb from dead outs. I definitely wouldn't depend on a slatted rack. By relying on swarm traps, not only are you not guaranteed to catch your swarms, but any that you do catch does not increase your honey yield. All you are doing is maintaining your bee numbers while not making surplus honey. Sound like a lot of wasted effort to me. :kn:
Also, don't ask for advice and then state that you won't take certain advice. you are putting yourself in a catch 22. Cutting out swarm cells every 7-10 days is almost a sure fire way to prevent swarming. Sometimes they will still swarm anyways. And just because you cut them out does not mean you have to destroy them. Why not put them in a small split/queen bank? Why not place them in a mating nuc that you prepared a couple weeks earlier? Why not sell or trade than with other Beekeepers? Why not harvest royal jelly from them for future grafting? Do you see what I'm getting at? You are selling yourself short both in the short term and long term when you ask for advice that you just want to hear. 
Splits are also a good thing to do. Especially if you have been removing queen cells til about May or June. By that time your colonies have hopefully become monsters due to no swarming and you can make strong splits at the time nectar is ceasing which cuts off the swarming impulse. Remember those queens in the queen banks and mating Nucs mentioned earlier? This is when you would introduce those queens that you originally didn't want to tear out to the queenless splits you make in late May or June. This way, you're not only keeping your honey crop, but you are also making increase. 
Why are you so set on not cutting out cells? :scratch:
Also, clipping doesn't keep them from swarming. It just buys you an extra week or so. Eventually the clipped queen will get killed and the hive swarms with the virgin queens.


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## JustinH (Nov 11, 2013)

TalonRedding said:


> You need to understand why swarm management is necessary first of all. It's not only a safety concern in a neighborhood. it is also to maximize the honey crop. Basically, a swarmed colony=no honey crop.
> You are in your second year and are considering checkerboarding. More than likely you do not have enough drawn comb for checkerboarding to be successful unless you have come across a bunch of it from someone else or are recycling comb from dead outs. I definitely wouldn't depend on a slatted rack. By relying on swarm traps, not only are you not guaranteed to catch your swarms, but any that you do catch does not increase your honey yield. All you are doing is maintaining your bee numbers while not making surplus honey. Sound like a lot of wasted effort to me. :kn:
> Also, don't ask for advice and then state that you won't take certain advice. you are putting yourself in a catch 22. Cutting out swarm cells every 7-10 days is almost a sure fire way to prevent swarming. Sometimes they will still swarm anyways. And just because you cut them out does not mean you have to destroy them. Why not put them in a small split/queen bank? Why not place them in a mating nuc that you prepared a couple weeks earlier? Why not sell or trade than with other Beekeepers? Why not harvest royal jelly from them for future grafting? Do you see what I'm getting at? You are selling yourself short both in the short term and long term when you ask for advice that you just want to hear.
> Splits are also a good thing to do. Especially if you have been removing queen cells til about May or June. By that time your colonies have hopefully become monsters due to no swarming and you can make strong splits at the time nectar is ceasing which cuts off the swarming impulse. Remember those queens in the queen banks and mating Nucs mentioned earlier? This is when you would introduce those queens that you originally didn't want to tear out to the queenless splits you make in late May or June. This way, you're not only keeping your honey crop, but you are also making increase.
> ...


All good advice except that I'm not interested in making increases. In my original post I said, "I don't want/can't afford any more colonies". I'm just a backyard hobbyist. The bees might be free (from splits) but the woodenware, paint, etc. isn't. 

And I'll be checker boarding with foundation-less frames because that's all I've run so far.

So back to my original question. For people that live in neighborhoods, should swarm traps be part of swarm management?


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## AdamBeal (Aug 28, 2013)

Swarm traps for your own hives I think are a crap shoot if your bees swarm chances are they won't go to one of your traps (didn't work for me). What is more likely I think is a swarm from somewhere else will move into them. Then you have just what you were trying so hard to avoid... more free bee colonies.


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## enjambres (Jun 30, 2013)

Justin,

You are confusing two things: checkerboarding for swarm control and use of alternating foundationless frames. They are often referred to by the same word, but are not the same thing.

Swarm-control checkerboarding is done by alternating honey-filled frames and drawn-but-currently-empty frames. They can be empty because they were extracted from the previous fall, or because the bees cleaned them out over the winter.

Getting the bees to draw out foundationless frames is another kettle of fish. In general, if you checkerboard foundationless frames with drawn comb (filled or empty or orginally foundationless or built onto some kind foundation) what you'll get is a lot overly-fat wonky comb that will make your future management difficult because the bees seem don't seem to readily recognize the new frame as a potential comb position and view it more like just empty space extending outward from the sides of the adjacent combs. Bees will more successfully draw out several foundationless frames that are grouped together, in my short experience, but salting completely empty frames between drawn combs creates voids throughout your hive, and at least for me and my bees, results in a mess. OTOH, bees will easily draw out frames with foundation (or Piercos) placed between other drawn frames. We see all frames as just different varieties of the same thing, but the bees don't see it that way, I think.

That said, last year I was in the same place as you - just starting my second year and I had almost no surplus drawn comb from the first year. None that had been extracted, so only what the bees had eaten over the winter.

What I did to try and manage swarming was to carefully add a single undrawn frame on the edge of the brood nest, alternating sides about once each week. My bees eagerly drew out these frames. I used a mixture of Pierco plastic and foundationless with just a starter strip. The bees did well on both, but the foundationless was most used by the bees for drone comb - and boy, did they raise a lot drones at first! The combs they made were works of art, and by the end of the summer sturdy enough for routine handling. But they also tended to be overly fat and lumpy so I had to do a lot of trimming (and will have still more work on them this spring). As the boxes became full of brood comb, I raised a few frames up from the lower box, placed them in the center, bracketing them between frames of pollen and honey, then came back after 5-7 days and started adding empty frames on the sides of the brood nest in both boxes (eventually I had three or four boxes of solid brood and wound up with astoundingly populous hives. (That created some other issues, but booming hives are always better than dinks, right?)

This was an intense, very intrusive (you have to get into every box, every time and mess around in the brood nest), very laborious job. But two out of three colonies didn't make swarm preps. (One did start and I split it to forestall that and wound up with just a single additional colony after much drama.) I could have given away the extra colony but I wanted to get a single daughter queen from each of my original queens anyway.

I really like the foundationless combs, but individual foundationless frames among other combs tended to be more free-form in their thickness. Frankly, Pierco frames seemed to make the flattest, most uniform of all, but have some issues. I have read here on BS of Lauri Miller's intriguing idea of cutting plastic foundation pieces (vertically) and installing only 2/3 or half of a sheet per frame. This saves some money, while giving the bees a useful planar guide for their creations. I think I will be doing that this year. I also plan on using a drill press to cut some holes in my Pierco frames for the bees to walk through in the corners. 

There other other ways to handle swarming impulses other than "checkerboarding" as described by Walt Wright. His system, though, requires having enough drawn comb. I think the bees, even if they are on foundationless frames already will still see the empty-_frame_ void differently than if it's just empty, but already-drawn foundationless frames. Anti-swarm checkerboarding is empty/full/empty/full rather than drawn/undrawn/drawn/undrawn, if you see what I mean. 

I haven't decided which I'm method I'm going to try. I'm studying now about Snelgrove boards.

There is one other thing: I found that seeing eggs on completely foundationless frames was very difficult, and much, much, easier on black plastic. I am older so I always use a magnifier, but even with that, light wax made the eggs very hard to see. And I like to see where the eggs are, so making that quicker and easier is important to me.

This whole swarm-prevention thing came as a rude surprise last winter when I was just starting to breathe easily again thinking that my first-year colonies were going to (amazingly) make it through the winter. I thought I was just on the verge on escaping catastrophe only to confront another potential crisis.

For small beekeepers like you and me, the frequent suggestion that "just make more colonies" is not really an answer. I realize that many, perhaps most beeks want as many hives as they can get. So we have to dig deeper to find a less-typical solution that meets our needs.

One thing you might do, in advance, is get one of those Jester Bee plastic nuc boxes set-up, so that you would have the wherewithall to stow an emergency, swarm-intervening split for a few days before finding it a new home. The thing is the swarm-prevention split usually involves removing your original queen from her colony. Would you want to part with her? Otherwise you could do a more complicated process of removing her and enough brood and bees to make the original colony feel like the swarm has happened. Let them go ahead and make a new queen. Once she's cooked up and laying, you could separate her and some of her brood and give those away and immediately newspaper combine the original queenn back with remaining bees and hope by then they are over the impulse for the year.

A Snelgrove board makes some of this possible, but I find the explanation of it very confusing so am trying to borrow one so I can read about it while I have one set up on a dummy hive. 

There is a very useful bee site formerly maintained by the late Dave Cushman. He has detailed plans and exlanations of Snelgrove boards.

I wish I had a clear anti-swarm program to suggest for those of us not focused on endlessly increasing the size of our apiaries. You may have to, like I do, kind of wing it for the first few years. I do have enough comb this year to try a pure Walt Wright-style checkerboarding on one of my hives. But not on all four of them.

Good luck!

Enj.


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## WBVC (Apr 25, 2013)

For that don't want to increase and are concerned about cost it is likely someone in your area would be happy to purchase your Woden ware along with the bees. I am new a well but am thinking that bees are no different from other living things...the urge to go forth and multiply is a good thing for the bees, natural and strong.


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## JustinH (Nov 11, 2013)

Thanks enjambres. Very helpful.


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## TalonRedding (Jul 19, 2013)

Maybe I'm being thick headed again. Why is it that you don't want to cut queen cells? And why not make splits and sell them to area Beekeepers? You say you can't afford more colonies, which I understand completely. So, why not make some money off of them? It's a win win for everyone. Your bees are paying for themselves, another beekeeper gets to take care of the bees, and swarming has been controlled.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

I'm all for swarm management, but some of the propaganda out there is a bit confusing to me. I just read an article about beekeeping in a farm magazine that said something to the effect that swarming was the most dreaded disaster of beekeeping. Since it's not even on my list of "dreaded disasters" I found that confusing. And if it was on my list of "to be avoided" it wouldn't even be in the top ten. Sure I like to keep them from swarming so I can get more honey and so those bees don't end up in the trees. But if you live in an area of houses and lawns, and your hive swarms, there is a 99 out of 100 chance no one will even notice. Including you. Sure I would like to keep them from swarming, but I would not lose any sleep over it. Swarms don't hurt people. If I were describing a swarm "disaster" is not even a word that would come to mind. Words like "magical" and "electric" and "amazing", but definitely not "disaster"...

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesswarmcontrol.htm


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## GaryG74 (Apr 9, 2014)

Great advice by all. Look up Snelgrove Board and how to use them. Another tool to use to prevent swarming. A bit of work but they are effective in preventing swarms. Like Michael said, "disaster" is a strange way to describe swarming. I tend to look at swarms as "magical" and "amazing" also. Even when they come from my hives, I still am amazed by this wonder of Nature. Remember, only healthy hives will try to swarm (in the "reproductive swarm" sense) so if your hives are trying to swarm, you've been doing something right.


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## JustinH (Nov 11, 2013)

TalonRedding said:


> Maybe I'm being thick headed again. Why is it that you don't want to cut queen cells? And why not make splits and sell them to area Beekeepers? You say you can't afford more colonies, which I understand completely. So, why not make some money off of them? It's a win win for everyone. Your bees are paying for themselves, another beekeeper gets to take care of the bees, and swarming has been controlled.


On not cutting queen cells, I've heard stories of beeks cutting the cells to prevent swarming but the bees swarm anyway and now they're queen-less because you've removed the cells. As for selling splits, I think I'll email my local club members to see if any would want them. Then maybe they can provide me with their extra wooden ware and I'll just give them free bees.

And I like your comment too Michael. That puts my mind at ease. I had one hive swarm last summer and they landed in one of my trees just 25' from the hive. Unfortunately I didn't get to witness the actual swarm but I did retrieve the swarm from the tree. If my TBH didn't have an observation window, I'd have not known they had swarmed that day.


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