Sunday 10 March 2013

Shook Swarm

I'm worried.
Last week when it was warm I decided to shake all of my bees out of their damp mouldy hives into clean dry hives using a technique called a 'shook swarm'. This involves taking each frame out of the old hive out and shaking off any bees into a new hive. It's absolutely essential to ensure you don't lose the queen, so I put a queen excluder underneath each hive to make sure she didn't roll out of the bottom!
Needless to say, bees don't like being thrown around like this, but mine were very good natured and within half an hour they were settled down and happily feeding on the sugar syrup I'd given them. I don't usually feed my bees sugar but all their honey and a few frames of brood were left behind in the old hives so unless I fed them they would starve.
It might seem brutal to remove the bees from their food and brood, but that brood contains varroa mite and those old frames might harbour bee diseases such as nosema. Although the manoeuvre will set the bees back a week or two, colonies purged of disease usually come back very strongly.
So why am I worried? Well more experienced beekeepers tell me it's too early in the season for such drastic measures. Initially I discounted their opinions because doing a 'shook swarm' in springtime is a relatively new technique that most of the 'old hands' have never used. But then it turned cold, and the forecast is for snow....
This cold snap is forecast to last for another 72 hours so I will have to wait until Thursday at the earliest to see if my bees have survived.

1 comment:

  1. And? Have they survived? I'm been fretting all week, watching the weather get worse and worse and hoping for good news from you.

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