The books / Swarming and Increase / chapter 13 of 15
After the swarm
All chapters
- 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
The colony you inspect the week after a swarm has left looks nothing like the one you saw before.
The new virgin queen emerges around day sixteen counting from the egg that started the cell, roughly a week after the old queen departed with the swarm, and the hive has no queen at all in between, only cells and patience.
Once she emerges, she still needs days to mature, then several more for mating flights in reasonable weather.
That gap costs you a generation of workers that never gets reared, on top of the roughly half the workforce that already left.
Expect the colony's honey crop for the season to take a real hit, since it is short-handed during exactly the weeks the main flow needs it at full strength.