Spring is really here along with the odd shower and a really good snowstorm. The weather is so changeable. One day its as hot as summer, the next is wet and windy. The new spring growth on trees and shrubs in the bush looks spectacular with all the different colours and hews. Everything seems to be flowering and the bees are building up well. The bees brought in a tremendous amount of honey from the willow and this has set them up well for the expected dearth in November.

The other day I walked to the railway station to attend a meeting in the city and was amazed at the amount of trees and scrubs flowering. Lemonwood, Kowhai, Rangiora, Taupata, Karo, Kohuhu as well as lots of garden scrubs, and like many other inner city suburbs, not a honey bee in sight. We have received at least three calls this spring with the same complaint. People like to see bees around but don't want a hive next door to them.

Around the farms and bush fringes, Barberry, Mingi Mingi, Cabbage Tree and Hawthorn are just budding up. When these come into flower, swarming usually occurs as hives quickly get packed out with honey.

Swarming is said to be caused by the following: A lack of space for the extension of the brood nest (reversing the bottom two supers assists with this). Lack of storage room for honey (Add that extra super to give the bees more room well ahead of time). Crowding of the brood nest. (As above). Insufficient ventilation and high temperature (crowding outside on a hot day - lift the top mat a little with a twig - add another super). Lack of vigour in the queen and an intermittent honey flow. Any or all can stimulate swarming - take your pick

Make preparations now. Read your bee books on swarm prevention and plan ahead. Consider what you are going to do when you see that egg in the queen cell bud. Cutting out queen cells doesn't generally work. A swarm issues shortly after the first queen cell is capped on the ninth day or soon after, weather permitting. Not when the queens are about to emerge on the sixteenth day.

There are many labour intensive schemes around that help to prevent swarming. L.E. Snelgrove produced a book on "Swarming Its Control and Prevention" where he uses a screened board to divide the population of the hive. A good read from the NBA Library. Try it once if you like to get the idea. However the easiest method to follow is simply requeen hives every second year, give the bees plenty of room ahead of time and during October, when all the brood is in the second super but extends part way down into the bottom super, reverse the supers to create more room.

For those hives that are determined to swarm, have extra equipment handy and make splits as soon as you see a hive making preparations to swarm. Check your hives every ten days or so by splitting the hive apart between the first and second super and looking for queen cells developing along the bottom bars of the second super. Once cell development has begun, find and put the queen along with two or three frames of emerging brood and a few frames of honey in a super, on top of the existing hive (with the split board entrance to the rear). Plug with grass to stop the field bees returning to the lower hive. (Release next evening). At the flow (December), reverse the hives, old queen goes to the bottom and unite with two sheets of newspaper. Essentially it is better to artificially swarm a hive and unite it back again when the honey flow starts rather than loose your honey crop with a swarm.

Apart from Auckland (where one might encounter small swarms as a result of hives absconding from varroa mite pressure), its time to put out a few bait hives. A super with a couple of old drawn frames and the rest with foundation frames. Close the entrance down to 10-20 mm and place the super on a shed roof or up high somewhere near your hives. Swarms are attracted to apiaries and will quickly find your bait hive.

If you observe the bait hive for a while, you will notice a few bees coming and going and congregating around the entrance. Over the next few days the activity gradually increases until at about 11 am. on a beautiful fine morning, the swarm will arrive. That evening, the swarm can be transferred to your apiary. If you want to use the swarm to increase your hive numbers, order a new queen for it, otherwise leave it for a week or two to establish or until the new queen arrives. By this time the swarm should have produced a little brood making the old queen easier to find and dispatch. If you don't want an increase, kill the queen and unite the swarm to a weak hive using two single sheets of newspaper between the supers so they unite slowly without fighting.

Some queens are hard to find. Dark bees generally run off the frames. A legacy from one hundred and fifty years ago, when the bees that did not run out of a skep during honey harvesting were killed with sulfur. Today a lot of the feral colonies in the bush still exhibit this tendency to run when disturbed.

Generally, the queen can be found on a patch of emerging brood laying in the freshly cleaned cells. Use only a minimum of smoke. As you go through the hive, observe the face of the next exposed frames of brood. She is larger and stands out more against the light. If she is not there, observe the fame in your hand looking systematically across the frame for a gap between the bees. Bees tend to clear a space for her when she is laying but surround and groom her when she stops.

An alternative is to drive the queen into the second super by puffing smoke into the entrance two or three times a minute a part. Split the hive and look for her in the second super. As a last resort, drive all the bees through a queen excluder. She will remain behind but this can be very disturbing for the bees and the neighbourhood.

When found, dispatch her with a hive tool and expose the candy plug of the queen cage and pop in the new queen between two brood frames with the candy hole upwards. If you really want to make sure she will be accepted (introducing a yellow queen into dark Apis mellifera mellifera bees), there are two safe methods you can follow. Kill the queen and pop the cage in without exposing the candy. After four days, open the hive and observe the bees covering the queen cage. If they are grooming the cage, release her immediately on to the frame (handle with care as young queens tend to fly) and watch her for a minute or two. She immediately starts pushing her way through the bees looking for cells to lay in. If the bees pounce on her, cage her again and look for another queen or some queen cells. After another four days try releasing her again. This time it should work. Another method is to use a push in cage. Shake the bees off a frame of emerging brood, push a wire gauze cage (80-mm X 80-mm) into the surface of the comb, then lift one corner and pop the queen underneath and press the cage down again. The emerging bees will look after the queen and she will be accepted. Remove the cage once she has started laying.

At this time of the year, we get numerous calls for assistance from anxious home-owners saying we have bees in our house, yet they didn't see a swarm. Generally its only scout bees checking out a new home but they are very noisy communicating their intention. During this scouting stage it's easy to put off the bees by spraying a little fly spray in the hole / cavity they are investigating. This kills a few scouts and masks the odour they leave at the entrance, which directs more bees to investigate. Once you see pollen on their legs, a swarm has moved in and its a little more difficult and costly job to remove/ kill them.

With all the above in mind, I have been out during the fine weather doing my spring inspection. Clearing away grass and spraying it for good measurer. Stripping down hives, replacing broken and dark frames with last years drawn ones, scraping burr and brace comb of the tops of frames and the sides of supers (into plastic bags for later rendering). Adding a honey super to those hives that have massive amounts of sealed brood and always on the look out for AFB and mites. I have also been marking the queens as I come across them. Actually it's really surprising how many have superseded during the early spring. Hives marked for new queens now have young, fat, downy covered queen laying at full speed. In some hives, the queen cell she emerged from is still intact.

Some hives are now becoming very strong. The first hive I opened the other day was full of queen cells (this was mid September). A reasonable hives, full of bees, but was headed by an old queen with a patchy laying pattern. She was confined to the bottom super, as the one above was full of honey. Nothing much I could do at this stage. Find the queen and put her in a split above the existing hive. I left two or three good sizes queen cells in the bottom hive and top split and let nature do its thing.

In fact this was the only hive with queen cells I found all day but I did observe a number with a lot of queen cells buds. I'll have to split these hives next time through, as they are likely to swarm if I don't.

Not all my apiaries are well sited and I have one that was near to starvation when I visited it. Happens every year now that I think back and it is also short of pollen as well. Time to make this a seasonal apiary and let the bee build up on better pasture.

The other day I was sitting in front of a hive having my lunch watching the bees coming in with different coloured pollen and tried to work out what flowers the bees were visiting. Broom is easily identified. Bright yellow and the bees' backs are covered with pollen from the tripping mechanism of the flower. Pure white had to be from the onion weed. The deep red/purple could be from the native fuchsia but I'm not sure about the rest of the light yellow to darker yellows that were coming in. So many plants are flowering.

Beekeeping now becomes intense with its routine of inspections, checking and feeding. Remember that the bees produced in the last two weeks of October are the ones that bring in the honey during December. Look after your hives, give them room to expand, make sure they have plenty of stores and keep the queen laying so they will be strong at the start of the honey flow.

Check food and pollen, BL check, raise queen cells, requeen hives with mated queens, swarm control, cull out old frames, remove entrance reducers, and check stored supers for wax moth.

Frank Lindsay