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Author Topic: Cast Swarming... or  (Read 1525 times)

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Offline Jen

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Cast Swarming... or
« on: May 12, 2021, 08:03:38 pm »
I forgot! What makes a hive/colony swarm over and over again?

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Offline The15thMember

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Re: Cast Swarming... or
« Reply #1 on: May 12, 2021, 10:17:50 pm »
Usually it's too many queen cells and a large enough population.  It's happened to me several times.  When I do splits I like to leave 2 queen cells instead of just one in case the one I picked was a dud, but if the hive is big they will sometimes swarm with one of those virgins.  If a hive swarms or is split and there are many queens cells in the hive, instead of one of the queens stinging the others to death, the bees may swarm again, and again, and again, eventually swarming the colony to death as it were.   
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Offline Jen

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Re: Cast Swarming... or
« Reply #2 on: May 13, 2021, 02:08:30 am »
Hmm, Interesting!

When I first started chatting on this forum, I learned soo much, soo quickly. One of the things I learned is that when a hive continues to swarm repeatedly, that it's a genetic thing with the queens. That some queens make swarmy bees.

If that is the answer, then that would ring true with my first 10 years of beekeeping. I had the same genetics for all of those 10 years and my springs and summers were about retrieving constant swarming. I thought it was normal.

Then our town created a bee club. At one of the meetings I posed my swarming stories, and all of the others said to completely switch out all of my queens and change the genetics as fast as i could. 

I did that! And What A Relief the next season. No Swarming!

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Offline RAST

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Re: Cast Swarming... or
« Reply #3 on: May 13, 2021, 08:38:15 pm »
It goes along with catching swarms just gets you bees with a predisposition to swarm. Do the genetics prevent the first hatched virgin from going around and killing the rest as she surly would (and did) when I miscount the days raising queens?
 Typed the above and went over to Beemaster and Jim (Sawdstmakr) just wrote a good explanation there today. https://beemaster.com/forum/index.php?topic=54466.0
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