# Swarm Box vs Cloake Board for Cell Starting



## George Fergusson (May 19, 2005)

Anyone feel strongly one way or the other? I like the utility of using a single colony as starter and finsher by way of a cloake board (or floor without a floor) but something tells me that a good old fashioned swarm box full of bees might do a better job- or is this my imagination?

And if you favor a swarm box, how do you go about filling one with bees and what do you do with them when they've done their job?


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## Jon McFadden (Mar 26, 2005)

Hi George,
Dave Eyre, producer of the video "Queen Rearing" and "Nicot System Demonstrated", uses a swarm box for both grafting and the Nicot system. I talked with him about that and his response was that he was trying to demonstrate the systems in the simplest manner possible. In a poll he conducted, a large percentage of the respondees felt that the Nicot system was too complicated. I can tell you from personal experience, it is not. As with all queenrearing, a rigid schedule has to be followed.

The swarm box he used in the demo film was returned to a normal hive by releasing one of the queens it raised. In his video, he says that he doesnt use the cell builder for more than 2 rounds of queen cell building.

All of the queen rearing books I have enjoyed reading over the years say that the best queens are started under the emergency conditions of queenlessness and finished under the supercedure conditions in a queenright colony. 

Im still learning, so I cant say one way or the other. All I know is less resources are required using the Cloake Board and the conditions suggested in the literature can be met with the least intrusive manipulations. 
Jon

[ February 25, 2007, 11:31 AM: Message edited by: Jon McFadden ]


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>Anyone feel strongly one way or the other?

As long as there are lots of bees in the starter, they both work fine.

> I like the utility of using a single colony as starter and finsher by way of a cloake board (or floor without a floor) but something tells me that a good old fashioned swarm box full of bees might do a better job- or is this my imagination?

I think the idea is that it's easy to set up the conditions that will result in a lot of started cells in a swarm box, since you have populated it with nurse bees (from open brood) and they have nothing else to do. But if you do the cloake board system right all the nurse bees end up in the starter portion also, with little to do.

>And if you favor a swarm box, how do you go about filling one with bees

Shake bees from open brood. Marla Spivak's system (which is a combination of things from other people's systems) is such that the open brood all ends up in the same box, so you shake the bees off the frames in that box to make the starter (aka swarm box). But you can shake them off of open brood from several hives if you need to.

> and what do you do with them when they've done their job?

If you have a good strong hive for the starter/finisher and if you shook them all out of that hive, it's easy enough to just dump them in front of the entnrace and let them go back in after the queens are started, or just dump them back in the hive, or use them to make up mating nucs for a previous batch of queen cells.


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## Jon McFadden (Mar 26, 2005)

No matter which method is used, one important thing must be observed. It is very important to have a feeder on the colony. I didn't do this last year and lost queen cells because of it.
The instructions I followed for the Cloake Board were published in an article called "Cell Door" in the December 1993 issue of Bee Culture. 
I developed a spreadsheet that integrates both the Nicot system and the Cloak board.
With the spreadsheet, you can select the egg laying day and see what day the manipulations fall on so you can adjust the time line to best fit your activities. Heavy manipulation on the weekend, light activities during the week.

[ February 25, 2007, 04:08 PM: Message edited by: Jon McFadden ]


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## Jon McFadden (Mar 26, 2005)

Here is a link to the spreadsheet.
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/beekeeping/files/Nicot%20Queen%20Rearing/


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## Ross (Apr 30, 2003)

And here is the Michael Bush timeline in Excel
http://www.myoldtools.com/Bees/queenschedule.xls


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## Antero (Jan 9, 2005)

Jon,your link doesn't open.

Terry


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## George Fergusson (May 19, 2005)

Thanks guys, you've cleared up my questions. Last year (my first time) I did the swarm box approach but was working with generally weak hives. It worked out OK but it wasn't easy. I'd have been better off waiting a couple of weeks I think. 

Now to play with some spreadsheets.


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## Jon McFadden (Mar 26, 2005)

Hi Antero,
You may have to join the group to get access.
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/beekeeping/
Jon


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## Jon McFadden (Mar 26, 2005)

Hi George,
I agree. A spreadsheet makes it easy to plan the starting date. I wish I had done it last year. We just started on a weekend and numbered the days on a calendar for the different events. This year, I put together a spreadsheet that not only has the dates, but the day of the week and the day in the cycle. That way there is no confusion. Will and I were always debating what was going to happen in the coming week.

Jon


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## jean-marc (Jan 13, 2005)

George:

I personally prefer swarm boxes. 2 colonies donate their nurse bees and I usually graft 36 cells per frame. 2 frames per swarm box. They are left there for 24-36 hours, depends. Once the cells are started they go back to the colony that donated the nursew bees. The nurse bees are returned to the donor colonies as well.

I like this system because I can go to any yard any day, work about 1 hour to start the swarm boxes, rest for 2 then graft for 1 hour and start 2 swarm boxes in that time. I'll graft 4 frames of 36 cells or 144 cells in that time.

Cloak boards always work better if you shake extra nurse bees into the top box. I don't like all the manipulations, multiple days, not good for ADD beekeepers. Besides the pallets do not have a rear entry built into them. So I prefer swarm boxes.

Jean-Marc


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## Jon McFadden (Mar 26, 2005)

Jean-Marc,
I agree with you about the pallet. You would have to make a two entrance box to have a chance. I won't speculate on success. However, a beekeeper in Washington state wrote an article in the Dec 1993 that he tired of shaking bees in bad weather and that was his reason for adopting the system that H. Cloake, a New Zealand beekeeper had developed.
Here is a link to the site that some might find interesting:
http://www.basingstoke-beekeepers.org.uk/queen-rearing.html
This lays out the whole procedure for using a single hive for queen rearing.
Jon


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## Fusion_power (Jan 14, 2005)

The basic advantage of the Cloake board is that queens can be raised over producing colonies and under less than the best weather conditions prevalent in early spring. It is important to follow the process properly by preparing the colony, feeding if needed, and grafting on time. But these same basic steps also apply to the swarm box. The swarm box may be easier for bulk production of queens. However, an experienced beekeeper can produce all the queens he wants with the Cloake system.

The best queens are reared under the swarm impulse in a very strong colony. The second best queens are reared under the queenless/supercedure impulses. The closer you can approximate swarming conditions, the better the queens you will produce. There are manipulations that permit queen rearing under all three sets of conditions. Swarming impulse was used by Carl Killion. Brother Adam used a combination of swarming impulse and queenlessness to induce cell building.

Darrel Jones


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

MB is correct, the key is to have lots of young bees and either way will work fine. We use a Cloake board, and make sure the entrances don't allow too many bees from the top box to return to the bottom box. We have developed a pretty efficient system although I think even the best bees can "hit the wall" and need a few days off.


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## bee crazy (Oct 6, 2005)

I used the Nicot system last year to requeen some swarms I had picked up in the spring. I had talked with David Erie at HAS last July. He gave me some Ideas to try and I had very good luck right out of the box. I raised four very nice queens in late July out of 10 cell cups . I know this is only 40% success rate but for my first try I was happy. My main problem was I didn't have enough bees to make up a standard cell builder so I used a five frame nuc, filled it with a frame of capped and emerging brood and nurse bees attached to the frames from four of my strongest hives. The fifth frame was a frame of pollen and honey. I took this nuc or swarm box away from the apairy to another yard and left it for a week. In the mean time I captured eggs via the nicot timing system then I took the cell frame to the nuc swarm box and pulled a center frame inserted the cell frame and shook off the bees from the frame I pulled. Buy this time bees were hanging out evey where they boiled out the top, I was shocked , I credit David for these ideas and it only shows you can rear queens with limited resources. I latered returned the frames and bees to the donor hives. All went well and I learned a lot about raising queens.


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## peggjam (Mar 4, 2005)

I also used five frame nucs as starter/finisher colonies last year. I placed one frame of 45 queen cells in each one, and although they only finished 15-20 of the cells, they turned out to be very nice queens. I raised about 50 that way last year. I plan on using full strenght colonies this year, and placing 2 frames of grafts per colonie. I have one cloake board, and I think I will do one by placing the queen above an excluder, with all the sealed brood beneath a week before I plan to graft, and then the day of grafting, removing the queen to a nuc, shaking all the bees off the frames above the excluder into the bottom box and then donating the frames of brood to other hives, and then placing my grafts in. Alot is trail and error, so just have to wait and see how it goes.


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