What do you do about swarming with your system?

Q. What do you do about swarming with your system?

A. There are several contrasting view points concerning swarming. One is that swarming is to be avoided at any cost. Economics is the main motivation here, in a commercial setting half of the bees swarming off cuts "production" in half. The other fear is that the bees would not be successful in "re-queening" (producing another queen) before the swarming. This would render the hive lifeless in a month.

From an ecological standpoint. Swarming is natural. It makes the bees happy, and encourages them to be productive. Suppressing a swarm is like never having the opportunity to expand, it makes conditions compact and stressful and creates a "lower immune system" in the community of bees, inviting disease. Another concept is that swarming helps to re-establish bees in the wild, which helps maintain diversity in the bee genetics. The main reason that the bees would not be successful at re-queening is that current bee cloning and splitting projects have depleted the innate "knowledge" of re-queening behavior. Naturally a bee hive that does not re-queen will be "unselected" from the gene pool, which is a bummer if it is your hive, but once you have established a healthy hive, the possibility of swarming without re-queening is very low.

If the Backyard Hive is carefully managed the swarming can be eliminated. Because of the window in the BYH we can estimate the brood size and brood can be removed or drone comb can also be removed. This will cut down on the number of bees and production, but will reduce the need for the bees to swarm.