Apiary in May
Colonies expand at a dizzying rate when food and flying days are plentiful. It will be necessary to control the innate desire to congregate.
There are three main ways to deal with swarms: either you let them swarm if they want to (which isn't a good idea unless you're in a highly isolated place), you physically stop them swarming, or you let the swarm process happen but under controlled or "artificial" conditions.
Swarming occurs spontaneously.
Swarming is a natural behaviour for bees. It is the only way for the colony to be spontaneously reproduced. Naturalists believe that only around 25% of swarms would develop into a strong enough extra colony to survive the winter. Therefore, bees will desire to swarm if the circumstances are right. Swarming behaviour is likely to occur in the presence of an abundance of bees, larvae, food sources, and drones capable of flight. The bees may be forced to swarm if there is insufficient room for them to lay eggs if the queen is three years old or older and her pheromone levels decrease, if they are sick, or if they are somehow "swarmy" genetically.
Unanticipated swarms occur
Due to the unusually mild February and March, a number of colonies will have seen an earlier-than-usual increase in bee numbers. Swarms are likely to occur if the brood box is overcrowded with bees. Increasing the available brood space and removing any extra honey or nectar from the brood box will just postpone or eliminate the swarming urge. If the bees are plenty and the fodder is ample, it is useful to feed them more.
Two approaches may be used to lessen the impact of swarming accidents. A bait hive or two could be a good addition to your yard or garden. This might be a temporary home for a swarm if one does emerge, though it's not unheard of. Removing the queen's wings is another possibility. If a swarm does happen, the bees will eventually head back to the hive, and it's not uncommon to see the queen and her attendant bees on the ground. These two choices work together to make it less likely that swarms may invade a neighbour's building.
Eliminating swarm cells by hand
Consider the situation at hand before making a decision on queen cells in a colony. Assist in swarming, supersedure, and emergency re-queening as queen cells. You need to move swiftly to stop the colony from swarming if you find out upon inspection that they are swarm cells.
It is a typical but incorrect practice to eliminate queen cells weekly in order to prevent swarming. It only buys the beekeeper a week to gather all the necessary tools for their chosen swarm control approach before the next inspection. Although destroying queen cells may temporarily demoralise the bees, it will not stop the colony from swarming in the long run.
Controlled swarming
A proactive measure to avoid swarming is to split a big colony under controlled circumstances and start a new colony from scratch. It would be wise to study up on a few of approaches and give them a try; there are plenty of ways to achieve this. Essentially, when queen pheromone suddenly disappears from a colony, all of these things trigger the emergency impulse, which causes the bees to build new queen cells. For a split to be successful, it must first produce nurse bees and, eventually, queen cells from eggs or larvae. The split needs to begin without a queen. The queen cells' larvae can be selected by the bees themselves or brought to the queenless colony in a vertical posture after being transplanted from another colony. You can raise queens using larvae from the colony you like.
Become Familiar with Bees
The intuitive mechanism of swarming can provide certain benefits for the sustainable beekeeper, and it is completely natural:
It is possible to cycle the frames by removing three or four frames of brood and bees from a robust, healthy colony and replacing them with new frames and foundations. This encourages the bees to focus on building comb and replacing themselves instead of swarming.
The natural and temporary control of Varroa populations can be achieved by a brood break, which occurs in a queenless colony after a split.
Starting a new colony is an inexpensive way to replace an ageing queen or increase the number of bees in your colony since it uses local genes instead of distant ones. The most suitable bees for your region are probably already there.
If one of your hives experiences issues throughout the season, you can always fall back on the second queen bee if you make an extra colony or two in the summer. Another option is to overwinter the spare colony, which would mean you have bees to replace any losses that may occur throughout winter.
