The books / Swarming and Increase / chapter 1 of 15
Reproduction, not disaster
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- Reproduction, not disaster
- The four triggers
- Swarm cells and supersedure cells
- Egg to capped in eight or nine days
- Why seven days
- Reading the signs
- Give them room first
- Cutting cells is not a plan
- Pagden's artificial swarm
- The Demaree method
- The nucleus split
- The bait hive
- After the swarm
- Growing an apiary for nothing
- Laying room is not storage
Swarming looks like failure from outside the hive, a queen and half the workforce vanishing into a tree, but from the colony's side it is the only way a single superorganism becomes two.
A colony that never swarms is not a healthier colony, it is one that never got the chance, whether from a beekeeper's intervention or a shortage of the space and resources that trigger the decision.
Reproduction sits deep in the biology: workers raise new queens along the comb, and once the first cell is capped, the old queen leaves carrying roughly half the population and a stomach full of honey with her. Nothing about this is a mistake the bees are making.