How to prevent swarming fever during the process of keeping Chinese bees (Apis cerana)

When a colony develops to a certain number of bees, and the brood combs in the hive reach four or five frames, natural swarming often tends to occur easily. During the swarming process, worker bees inevitably become idle and the queen's egg-laying rate declines. Especially when swarming occurs during the main honey flow, a large colony splits into small ones, which will affect honey yield. Therefore, before the natural swarming period, queen bees should be raised in planned batches to carry out artificial swarming. So how do you prevent swarming fever during the process of keeping Chinese bees?

1. Add egg-and-larva combs

Pull out all the sealed brood combs from the colony experiencing swarming fever, leaving the egg-and-larva combs. At the same time, take egg-and-larva combs from new splits, mating colonies or other weak colonies with plenty of eggs and larvae and add them to the colony for nursing, so that each frame of bees is responsible for one frame of egg-and-larva comb. This increases the burden on the worker bees and raises royal jelly consumption, thereby relieving the swarming mood.

2. Simulated swarming

Place a set of hive boxes with empty combs in the position of the colony with swarming fever, and put an inner cover about 3 cm in front of the landing board, with the end near the landing board tilted up. Shake all the bees of that colony onto the inner cover in front of the hive, and let them crawl through the gap into the prepared hive box. After destroying the queen cells on the egg-and-larva combs, return them to the original colony, and store the remaining brood combs with other colonies.

3. Divide the hive

First take down the super, destroy all the queen cells in the brood box, then add a super containing several empty combs and foundation frames, cover it with a queen excluder, and stack the original super back on top of the queen excluder. This divides the original hive into upper and lower layers, greatly expanding the volume, and creates conditions for the queen to go up to the middle super to lay eggs, making it very easy to eliminate swarming fever.

4. Remove the queen

At the peak of swarming fever, destroying queen cells is of no help. You can take out the queen and 2 sealed brood combs that are about to emerge, put them into a single box, and place it on the lid of the original colony's hive or beside the hive. After a few days, the queen's abdomen will enlarge and her egg laying will recover to its former active state. At this point, destroy all the queen cells of the original colony, and afterwards merge her back into the original colony.

5. Transfer in empty combs

At the start of the honey flow, you can remove all the brood combs from colonies with severe swarming fever and replace them with empty combs. This makes the colony feel that there are no successor bees, so it no longer meets the conditions for swarming. In addition, as the honey flow grows stronger day by day, the bees' honey-gathering instinct is enhanced, which will eliminate or weaken the swarming mood.

6. Swap hive positions

During the honey flow period, destroy all the queen cells of the colony with swarming fever, and on that day, during the peak period when worker bees leave the hive to gather honey, swap hive positions with a weak colony with a new queen that has no swarming fever, then add some empty combs to the weak colony. The colony with swarming fever, having lost a large number of worker bees, can generally have its swarming fever eliminated.

7. Exchange positions with a weak colony

During a period of abundant supplementary nectar sources, if a colony develops swarming fever, after cutting out the queen cells and drone brood, you can exchange positions with a weak colony or a mating colony. However, Chinese bees are rather alert, so before doing this, you must exchange the bees of the two colonies that are crawling on the division board or inner cover with each other, and shake them down in front of the entrances of the two colonies. Only if they do not bite each other can you exchange positions. The position exchange should be done on a sunny day, when the flying bees are out foraging. In the evening, add the surplus brood combs to the weak colony.