OKEHAMPTON Beekeepers’ fifth meeting of our winter programme was an informal workshop delivered by branch members, focussing on two important topics, swarm control and building and using a nucleus box.

The meeting was attended by more than two dozen members who braved a cold wet evening to hear the speakers.

Branch Chair, Simon O’Sullivan managed the schedule of topics and opened the meeting with a brief resume of the reasons the honeybees swarm and why as beekeepers we seek to control this basic urge.

Simon also described the first method of Swarm Control, the Demaree which separates brood and nurse bees from the queen and the foragers on a single hive stand (this method can also be used to raise queen cells in the top brood box separated from the queen).

Glyn Berrington mentioned the risk of drones being trapped above the queen excluder unless a separate entrance is provided for the top box.

Will Pyne described method No 2, the Pagden colony split. This requires a second hive stand to which brood box is moved before placing a second box filled with foundation on the original stand. The queen again needs to be found and transferred on her frame to the new box on the old stand.

Flying bees return to the original location (new box on old stand) leaving nurse bees to tend the brood and raise a new queen in the old box.

Ray King suggested that any supers on the original hive are best moved with the old box to the new hive stand so that stores are available to the nurse bees that have now lost their foraging force.

The next method, described by Juliana Montgomery, the Taranov method has one major advantage over Pagden and Demaree in that there is no requirement to find the queen!

The Taranov board (a ply or board surface, sloping up to the hive entrance) is placed a few inches in front of the hive and all the bees are shaken from their brood frames onto a white cloth draped over the board.

All the bees move up the board but only the forager bees fly over the gap back into the parent hive.

Neither the queen nor the nurse bees cross the gap, but instead cluster below the end of the top of the ramp, where they can then be shaken into a new box where they are subsequently fed generously.

Ray King then described to the meeting a very useful method of separating flying bees and the queen from nurse bees and brood without having to actually find the queen. This uses the natural instinct of nurse bees to move to nurture developing brood.

Remove the hive and place a new floor and brood box full of foundation onto the old hive stand. Shake all the brood frames of bees into a new brood box and place a queen excluder above.

Then place the old (now without bees) brood box above the excluder with a crown board on top, and leave for an hour or two.

During this time, the nurse bees will move up through the queen excluder to tend the brood, leaving the queen with the forager bees below.

Then you can proceed as per Pagden, moving the old brood box to a new stand with its content of nurse bees. This will require feeding, having lost its forager bees.

Neil Lamey then described the build and construction of Nucleus boxes. These are available commercially but all types feature non-removable floors which can be a drawback when it comes to cleaning.

Neil showed us his own design which has a separate floor securely attached to the main box by a steel “T” piece on each side of the box. The floor can be detached by removal of two screws.

There are very affordable poly nuc boxes now commercially available or another alternative is to divide a full size brood box into two, three or four separate compartments, with a few frames in each.

Neil mentioned that surprisingly these could be run beneath a single (not separated) super without separate colonies fighting.

Neil ended his talk by pointing towards a number of excellent books and on-line facilities for beekeepers including “The Apiarist” ( http://theapiarist.org/ ) which give details of techniques and also lots of DIY projects.

The final topic for the evening described a very clever and straightforward approach to swarm control in a top-bar long hive. This uses the top bar feature of having an entrance for bees at each end.

The manipulation used a top bar hive loaned to the branch by Kari McGowan and was demonstrated by Gill Thornton and Simon O’Sullivan.

First find the comb with the queen on it. This is then repositioned, at the opposite end of the top-bar long hive, and surrounded by foundation sheets suspended from top bars.

The whole hive is then lifted and rotated through 180 degrees, so that the entrances at each end are reversed and flying bees will now access the hive at the end which now houses the queen.

Nurse bees and brood are at the opposite end and will require feeding.

Gill showed us a handy wooden frame designed to take fondant or a feeder and hand from the hive in place of a couple of top bars.

Our next meeting is on Thursday, March 8 and will focus on the likely imminent threat of the Asian Hornet invasion and will include a workshop to make a large number of Asian Hornet traps from two-litre water bottles.

Will Pyne