I go back and forth on the issue of swarm management.  For years, I very successfully managed my hives so they wouldn't swarm, but this year I toed the Warre line and let my hive release a swarm.

Before I go into the results of that swarm, I figured I should back up and tell those of you without bees a bit about why hives swarm.  If it's healthy, most bee hives have the impulse to reproduce in the spring, but they reproduce at the super-organism level.  So, rather than producing an apple like a tree does, a bee hive produces a swarm, complete with everything needed to start a new colony (queen and workers).

Unfortunately, a hive that puts all that energy into building a swarm tends not to put away much honey.  Which is why so many beekeepers manage hives to prevent swarms.  On the other hand, my autumn varroa mite counts confirmed the big benefit of allowing swarming in a chemical-free bee hive.  Our mother hive (which released a swarm this spring) had a grand total of 6 varroa mites on the sticky board after a three day count, and the swarm we caught dropped only 1 mite during the same three days.  In contrast, the sticky board beneath the package we purchased this spring contained 86 mites.

To put those numbers in perspective, you have to estimate how many mites that would be per thousand bees in the hive (or at least guesstimate the relative size of the colonies).  This year's package hive is one of the strongest I've raised, so it's to be expected that more bees would host more mites.  However, I can't imagine there are more than twice as many bees in the package hive compared to the other two colonies, so swarming definitely helped break the pest cycle in the other two hives.

Whether the benefits of swarming will outweigh the lower honey yields on our farm is yet to be seen.  I'd really love to eventually develop a beekeeping method that both keeps bees alive without chemicals and provides sweet treats for the beekeeper.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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