Reuniting the Artificial Swarm

Well my Artificial Swarm (AS) was making progress but then I made a mistake and to put it bluntly it all went a bit tits up. The AS technique I'd used involves a Snelgrove board which has six doors paired above and below the central board on three sides,  you manipulate these to filter flying bees back to the colony below. After the first four of five days there should be two doors open, as time goes on you close and open doors so the hive entrance(s) move around the board but you only ever have two doors open one to the colony below and one to the colony above.

The AS seemed to be going well, a queen cell had hatched in there and I figured things were looking peachy. I couldn't find her but that wasn't a surprise she would be quite small and still had to mate anyway. However last week whilst having a look to check on her elusive majesty's progress I found two doors open into the artificial swarm. I suspect one got opened by accident rather than left open in fact but the result seems to have been that they got robbed out. Mature bees from the parent colony below them, Hive2 and the nucleus seem to have gone in and taken all the stored food. Being made up of young bees the AS probably didn't do much by way of defending itself and with no mature bees to bring in new food there was a risk of starvation. I went through all eleven frames seeing lots of slow moving (presumably tired and hungry) workers and drones aimlessly wandering on empty comb and a few dead bees on the crownboard and Snelgrove board.

I was surprised to see some dead drones who appear to have mated and made it back to the hive what was left of their sexual organs protruding from their abdomens. I'm assuming they mated elsewhere and returned to the hive rather than mated in the hive with the queen who hatched who'd be their sister. Normally a queen bee flies further to mate than drones which should ensure she doesn't mate with her brothers yielding inbred bees. These two dead bees are actually very small for drones being about the same size as workers.

If these were human this image wouldn't be safe for work

I closed up the box and made up some thin sugar syrup which I then poured into a frame of empty comb so the workers could immediately start distributing it amongst themselves then closed up the hive. I couldn't see any sign of the queen, she may have been in there or she may have been killed during the robbing or lost as a result of manipulating th Snelgrove's doors. I later put a small feeder in an empty super above the AS to give them something to eat and decided to unite them back to the parent colony.

There's a few different ways to unite different bee colonies and the aim is to minimise fighting between them. I initially chose the newspaper method which is probably the most common and probably one of the simplest. Basically you slip a sheet of newspaper above the stronger of the two colonies and put the weaker one on top of that. In theory the bees will nibble through the newspaper and by the time they're through will have made enough contact with the bees in the other colony to consider them part of the same colony. Once united you then open the boxes and choose your eleven best frames to remain and remove the rest or go with a double brood colony.

Two colonies meeting over (and under) a newspaper

After 5 days the bees didn't seem to be taking any interest in the newspaper so I decided to speed things along by going to plan B. Plan B was what I think I'll call the Peppermint Technique. It's quicker than newspaper but probably more disruptive for the bees. Rather than waiting for the bees to gradually make contact by nibbling through paper you spray them with a peppermint spray and put the frames and bees from the one hive directly into the other. The spray obscures their scent and gives them something to do as they lick it off. By the time they've finished licking the spray the two colonies are used to each other.

The former David A. Cushman whose encyclopedic beekeeping website remains a handy resource notes he used to use a water spray with a Fox's Glacier Mint dissolved in it for this purpose. I made up some 1:1 syrup and mixed in a few drops of peppermint essential oil, I then decided it was too thick to spray and watered it down a lot.

I went out to the hives with a spare brood box to house the frames I'd be removing and my peppermint spray. I whipped off the artificial swarm it it's box and discovered I'd been a little quick to give up on Plan A. the bees had started chewing through the newspaper. Ah well next time I'll remember: more patience and less work.

Like myself, the bees were unimpressed with my colleague's choice of reading material

Going through the original brood box I removed 6 frames to the spare and the five remaining ones I pulled out and misted on both sides with the peppermint solution. I pulled five frames from the AS -the ones with the most bees on and stored syrup and misted them too before popping them in the original brood box. Bees left on the unused frames were shaken off and misted with peppermint then I put a crownboard on top of the brood box and a contact feeder with some 1:1 syrup in it to give them something to do and replaced the roof.

Combined colony and spare frames.

I now have 11 spare commercial sized frames some drawn and some not. I'll need to pop them into storage safe from wax moth at some point. Although I'm going to need some of them when I move the captured swarm from the nuc to a full sized brood box.