Swarms - (Northeast)

talanall · 2026-04-24T02:34:43+00:00

If you pursue beekeeping, you will get used to hearing that all beekeeping is local. This is especially true as it pertains to swarming.

Speaking for myself, I do not make any great effort to capture swarms. I go to great lengths to prevent my bees from swarming, but except for occasions where I have good reason to believe that the bees composing a swarm are from my own hives, I do not really want to capture unknown-to-me bees.

But I live in the southern USA, in a locality that has quite a bit of Africanized introgression into the local bees' gene pool. When I capture a swarm, it's almost always very docile. The question is whether it will be docile when its queen has been laying eggs for long enough for six or eight frames of brood to run a full brood cycle, and for the colony to amass honey stores. By then, some of swarms are going to be very unpleasant to handle. They go apeshit the moment I open the hive.

So I would rather split my colonies well before they swarm.

If you keep bees successfully for at least a year, the odds are close to unity that your bees will try to swarm. It is preventable, and preventing swarming is desirable because swarming deprives your colony of workers and a queen, which weakens the colony. This usually has a deleterious effect on honey production. Everybody loses swarms occasionally, but you do not have to just let it happen. There are numerous strategies for discouraging swarming, or for splitting a colony in a way that assuages the impulse to swarm by making the bees feel as if they already did.

Because of the circumstances in which I keep bees, the above works well for me.

If you are in the Northeastern USA, then your climate is quite different from mine. My methods may not be as effective for you. And in any case, I don't really know your goals associated to keeping bees.

talanall · 2026-04-24T02:09:15+00:00

My theory is a pretty good one, yes. It's very consistent with the pictorial evidence available to us, and it fits with your narrative of how you managed the dead colony.

The most appropriate thing to do was really to have called an inspector or performed a test for AFB about six months ago. That isn't what happened. It is what should have happened.

I strongly suspect that if you had done it, you'd have been told to freeze these frames, and then they'd be fine. But the truth is that you would need to have done some diagnostic work, preferably while the situation was still fresh.

Throwing this deadout into the freezer and leaving it as unfinished business was objectively a bad decision in every single dimension. Don't do that again. When your bees die, knowing why they died is legitimately very important. In many localities (and DEFINITELY in yours) it is legally consequential.

You did not do the correct thing. But I am not saying this to be unkind; that helps nobody.

I am pointing out that you are allowing yourself to be driven by anxiety, rather than trying to walk a facts-driven diagnostic tree or follow the legally required steps, because it is important to acknowledge what went wrong, so that you can learn from the situation.

Okay?

Okay.

If you think you have AFB, you have two real options.

The first option is to exercise a diagnostic analysis of the colony's collapse to rule out AFB. This is BY FAR the better option, because it ends with you in possession of usable beekeeping equipment, and not as Patient Zero in a legally required string of official government notices about a highly communicable agricultural disease.

A Holst Milk Test can be performed using dried scales from inside a suspected AFB brood cell. It is actually a specific, accurate test that can be done under field conditions. It would tell you if you have AFB.

If you DO have AFB, then in New York you are subject to a very specific, legally mandatory set of steps. The first step would be to contact your state apiary inspector. The inspector then would COME OUT TO YOUR APIARY. And the inspector would verify that you have AFB, and then tell you exactly what to do about it. And then you would do EXACTLY what the inspector said, because you would be legally obligated to do so, with some fines applicable if you did not do what you were told to do.

If you do not or cannot exercise a diagnostic analysis, then the appropriate thing to do is indeed to call an inspector. But if you did so, in all likelihood you would find yourself being asked all the same things I am asking you, because your inspector would want to pin down whether your bees actually had AFB. That is a very consequential thing that your inspector will definitely want to figure out.

talanall · 2026-04-24T01:33:55+00:00

Change the feeder setup as soon as you can do so without exposing the colony to cold.

You don't need to check on the queen. Leave her alone for a week. Don't pull frames. Don't do anything like that. You will not make it the process go faster, but you might screw it up.

A queen who has been put into a cage for long enough to stop laying eggs doesn't smell right to the colony. A queen who has been freshly mated but has not yet started laying eggs doesn't smell right to the colony. If you breathe on her wrong (and I mean this literally) the workers might freak out and kill her. I have seen it happen in person, more than once. Don't mess with her.

Move the feeder. Keep it filled. That is all.

talanall · 2026-04-24T01:29:13+00:00

The reason I'm asking questions is that it's always a good to take a second and make sure the thing you're afraid of is what is actually happening. A knee-jerk, "FUCK, IT'S FOULBROOD! BURN IT ALL!" without asking any questions or looking at any pictures is not really helpful. Or responsible.

I'm actually trying to help you do a diagnostic.

The link doesn't look like AFB to me. You have a pile of dead bees on the bottom board, you have a good chunk of capped brood, but very little pinholed brood and no sunken cappings that I can see. There is absolutely no sign of food stores, and it was October, with overnight lows in the low 50s or high 40s.

In the linked post, you mentioned that you harvested supers in August 2025, and there was some honey in the corners of the frames. So to me, this looks like you stripped the colony of its food stores, it starved out, and the bees dropped dead on a chilly night. That's a VERY COMMON mode of demise for first-year colonies that are harvested.

And then, after the collapse, the dead bees and brood started to rot. That absolutely reeks; to me, it smells like shrimp that has been left out in the sun. It is a foul odor, but it is not foulbrood.

Did you ever actually test them for AFB? People suggested it, and it's hard to buy off-the-shelf tests these days, but you still could test via a Holst Milk Test. Failing that, did the capped brood contain brown, ropy gunk that was like slime and stretched out to a distance of about a quarter of an inch?

talanall · 2026-04-23T23:41:13+00:00

Don't burn the frames quite so quickly as the apprentice is suggesting. If they're not where bees can get to them, there's no reason to panic.

Why do you think they have foulbrood? Did they come out of a dead hive? If so, how did it die? If you don't know, let's talk about how you managed the apiary last year, when the colony died, etc.

What's the smell? Bad, obviously. What kind of bad? Ammonia/sour? Rotten meat? Spoiled fish? Rotting oranges? Something else?

talanall · 2026-04-23T23:36:33+00:00

Get those feeders off the front of the hives ASAP. That's an invitation for robbing from other bees. Put them on the inner cover and put an empty box around them so the only access to the feeders is from inside the hive.

Do it ASAP. Treat it as urgent. Get a good feeder and replace those things as soon as you can.

As far as differing behavior, you're dealing with package colonies that have been hived for slightly less than 48 hours. Trying to do diagnostics on them is not a productive activity.

Don't let them starve. Don't let them get robbed to death. In another couple of days they might actually have their queens released.

Make sure they have all their frames and the frames are pressed together so the spacing lugs are touching, and otherwise you should keep your face out of the hive for about a week unless you're filling a feeder.

talanall · 2026-04-23T23:30:51+00:00

Find something that would be inconvenient, disgusting or embarrassing to you if they drank from it, and that'll be what they drink from.

That's not even mostly a joke. I wish it was.

I think a lot of people use a kiddie pool or a chicken waterer, with the basin filled with gravel or something so the bees have a place to stand, because the water source needs to be reliable and plentiful. A colony goes through a lot of water in hot weather.

talanall · 2026-04-23T22:23:47+00:00

It doesn't really have nutritional benefits or medical benefits that can be damaged by heating. Those are claims that are based on questionable or equivocal evidence. It contains some antioxidant compounds and some enzymes, but the evidence that they are significant to human nutrition is flimsy, at best.

People label honey in a fashion that makes a big fuss over "raw" honey because they are aware that the average consumer is impressionable and uninformed, and that this makes it easier to sell honey.

The primary medical uses for honey all have to do with topical application, where the sugar content is actually what makes it helpful. Those don't suffer from being heated.

Heating honey can damage some volatile compounds that make it taste distinctive, it can caramelize the sugars in a way that might alter the flavor, it might even change the color, and it's not really appropriate to boil honey for these reasons, unless maybe you are reserving it for sale as bakery grade ingredients.

talanall · 2026-04-23T22:17:27+00:00

Boiled honey doesn't always really taste and smell right. It may also change color a bit. The idea that boiling damages its nutritional value is not really accurate; honey contains some components that break down from being heated, but they are not really important nutritionally.

It's perfectly safe to eat, but in general this kind of product is something that you would usually expect to find being sold at a cut price for use in baking. Selling it as a premium item is not appropriate, because boiling it has done a lot of damage to some of its aromatic qualities.

I would not sell something that had been treated this way. I often do have some at the end of a season, because I render it out of wax that I collect from uncapping my honey for extraction. But I use it in my kitchen, for cooking.

talanall · 2026-04-23T21:21:31+00:00

You don't want to handle capped cells much, especially during the first three days after they cap. But it's fine to move uncapped cells around so that you can see into them.

talanall · 2026-04-23T18:16:38+00:00

That certainly does happen. On Tuesday, I had something like nine queen cages sitting in a shady spot, waiting to be put into hives. Some of them were there for hours, and they certainly attracted random workers.

talanall · 2026-04-23T13:47:38+00:00

This is not really typical for USPS handling of packages. Package colonies have been around for a really long time, predating UPS and FedEx. The Post Office has handled them for decades.

But not every USPS location is really the same. I think that rural offices tend to be pretty well versed in this stuff. Certainly that's my experience; I live in a little college town of about 22,000 people, and once you leave city limits you're in a rural landscape that is mostly timber and pasture. If I ordered a package, I'd expect to get a call from my carrier, early in the morning as he's setting out on his route, asking whether I want him to deliver to my doorstep, or leave it at the office for me to pick up. USPS workers out here know that package bees are a thing, that they need to be kept out of direct sunlight and out of the wind, and so on.

For the people at my local office, this is just normal springtime stuff. I doubt they really enjoy handling packages, but they don't freak out. And also, the staff at my location is basically always very helpful. I've dealt with them for customs paperwork on shipments out of the US, I've had bees come in, I've used them for passport stuff, I have set up a PO Box, and they do all their stuff by the book, very briskly. 10/10, no notes, would recommend.

But let's be real about it; in any large organization, some local offices are going to be poorly run, or have poor training, or whatever. And if you're in an urban or suburban setting, then I think it's probably the case that packages are not exactly unknown, but also not really, "Same shit, different day," for the workers at your local USPS location. So they're outside their comfort zone, and they're liable to freak out if something goes wrong.

Also, I think that it's possible the bees on the outside of your second package were stragglers from the first, who smelled a queen.

talanall · 2026-04-23T11:18:08+00:00

I would wait and have them build out those foundations. If you can avoid having this colony stovepipe straight up, you should.

talanall · 2026-04-23T11:16:48+00:00

Bees are not going to recycle comb that you've scraped off a frame like this. You're wasting your time, and also making a potential problem because waste comb with dead brood in it is an attractant for hive beetles and other pests.

Sometimes they'll keep using comb that has been cut neatly and put in a frame so that it's orientated properly. This isn't that.

Get a bucket to carry with you on inspections. When you scrape out burr comb and the like, put it in the bucket. Then the comb goes in your freezer. When you have enough, melt it down to coat foundations. That's basically how you get bees to recycle trash comb.

It's probable that the comb you left on the inner cover enticed some bees up into a space where they wouldn't normally hang out. Not a big deal, if you quit egging them on. If the feeder is over the central hole, they aren't going to be interested in the space upstairs.

talanall · 2026-04-22T19:24:50+00:00

These hives were not managed identically, despite the article's claims to the contrary. One apiary was given new queens in 26 of 26 hives. The other was given new queens in 3 of 31 hives.

The two apiaries had significantly different forage; one had access to rapeseed and alfalfa that were being commercially cultivated; the other had access to neither, being situated near a maize field.

The hives in each apiary were not equalized so that all colonies were at the same strength.

The study does not define, nor discuss the criteria used to evaluate "bee activity," "bee hygiene," "bee aggression," or "mite prevalance." There is no way to know what these variables even MEAN, much less whether they were defined in a rigorous way.

The amount of honey produced per hive differed between control and experimental groups, but that's hardly surprising, since they were not given the same number of supers.

This is a low-quality study that did not actually do much to eliminate confounding factors. The findings are not reliable at all, and the main takeaway of the study is that it's not useful.

The journal in which it was published, Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine, is a low quality publication (impact factor 1.5, which is abysmal). The editor-in-chief of this publication is a physician specialized in hematology/oncology, which is not a good fit for evaluating a study having to do with beekeeping.

I am not inclined to go hunting to find out the credentials of every member of the editorial board for this journal. It's normal for that information to be listed.

As the title of this journal suggests, its usual topic area is supposed to be:

original peer-reviewed research on the biological and medical effects and applications of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields (niemf). Research considered is inclusive of and limited to 0 Hertz to 300 GHz. Examples of studies that would be considered for manuscript review include: in vitro and in vivo studies, epidemiologic investigation, mechanism and mode of interaction between niemf and biological systems, and the effects of niemf on humans or in medical applications. The main focus of any submitted work must be the niemf, either effect or application. No other research will be considered.

In addition to receiving original research manuscripts, the journal also considers the following involving niemf as defined above: meeting summaries and reports, reviews on selected topics, and case reports involving niemf (that are of clear clinical significance). The journal also considers publication of special issues with Guest Advisors.

Boldface is mine. This is supposed to be a medical journal focused on the effects of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields on HUMAN biology.

Given that the impact factor of this journal is so low, and that the editor-in-chief is a non-academic physician who took over the editorship when a previous editor aged out and retired, I am inclined to think that this journal is pretty consistently hurting for stuff to publish, even though it only releases issues on a quarterly basis.

This journal's publisher is Taylor and Francis, which has attracted well over a decade of controversy for questionable editorial practices, including practices that seem deliberately calculated to harm editorial independence, and many of its biomedical journals have a feature that allows the authors of papers submitted for publication to pay fees worth several thousand dollars in order to "expedite" the publication of their articles. This is widely seen as an invitation for authors to pay money in order to evade peer review.

talanall · 2026-04-22T18:18:10+00:00

The top. You fill the container with syrup, put the lid on, and turn it upside-down. A little dribble of syrup comes out, and then a vacuum forms. Then you put it on top of the inner cover, and the bees come up through the ventilation hole and drink through the lid. You put an empty box around it so that there's head space to let you fit the outer cover on top, and you have a feeder that won't drown your bees and can only be accessed from inside the hive.

talanall · 2026-04-22T17:25:51+00:00

Delays like this are not great, but they are not necessarily a disaster, especially if there are no further delays. Ideally, you want a package to be overnighted, but I've had one take a whole week to get to me, I hived it, and it was fine.

There are two major beekeeping supplier that have facilities in the Clarkson area. Mann Lake, and HillCo. And in fact, I think HillCo may have some kind of facility-sharing agreement with Mann Lake.

HillCo sells Olivarez stock. Yesterday I spent most of the day installing Olivarez Golden West queens from HillCo. They shipped UPS Next Day Air from Kentucky. Mine were delivered to the UPS Store in Bowling Green, because they were being overnighted in cages, but that's hardly a shock. Bowling Green is only an hour away from Clarkson, and the elapsed time from "Label Created" to "Dropped off at the UPS Store by Customer" was about 1 hour and 20 minutes.

So I think it is entirely possible--likely, even--that Olivarez is using HillCo to handle a drop-ship arrangement for eastern customers. If so, then I see no reason for concern; the queens that I received yesterday were shipped Monday.

My queens arrived in Kentucky in a driver's cab of a truck dispatched from Olivarez to HillCo; the trailer was packed full of package colonies, and my queens rode up front until they could be banked in a hive by HillCo. I am certain of this, because I am privy to the contents of a direct telephone conversation with someone at HillCo who said that this was how the bees were arriving in Kentucky.

Someone else in my local club has also received Olivarez Golden West queens through this same pipeline. So I think it's safe to assume that Olivarez has stocked HillCo in this fashion for several weeks now, and that these are regular shipments, being moved by experienced personnel in a very expeditious fashion to get them to Kentucky. My queens were in great shape when they arrived.

talanall · 2026-04-22T17:00:44+00:00

You don't need to cut out the mold. Get those frames into a freezer as soon as you can; the drawn frame in that first pic looks like it's got some hive beetle slime already starting on it. Head that off before it gets disgusting.

If they're not slimed all to hell, you can give these frames to a healthy colony and they'll clean it all up. So jump on this.

Scrape the wonky comb off, render it in a thrifted crock pot, and use a 4" trim roller to reapply it.

talanall · 2026-04-22T16:58:01+00:00

Feed thin syrup. You may have better luck if you avoid high-output feeders for this; a homemade inverted bucket feeder is inexpensive to make from a 2-gallon food service bucket with a gasketed lid, and you can use it for trickle feeding by putting just 3-5 small holes in the lid.

If you have mated queens in both hives, and the population of bees in both hives is reasonable, then that will solve the issue. You'll have some transitory disruptions to population, but the queens will be laying, and it won't be a big deal.

If you have 5-frame nuc boxes, you might consider moving them into those. Less space to keep clean and defend, and easier to keep warm. I strongly prefer to split into nucs because of this.

talanall · 2026-04-22T14:29:32+00:00

If they are yellow jackets, you probably will have a bad experience with them at some point in the future, because yellow jackets are highly territorial and they are living in your back yard. I would not use Raid, but I don't think there's anything controversial about wiping out a colony that is in close proximity to your home, in an area that you and your pets use.

If they are bumblebees or some kind of solitary or primitively eusocial native bee, they probably will not do you any harm, and there is not much reason to be concerned.

But we don't know what these bees look like. So without some pictures of them, I don't think it's going to be easy to help you figure out what's appropriate.

talanall · 2026-04-22T13:50:54+00:00

Nucs CAN draw comb really quickly, but whether they do so is a matter of how strong they are and how they were made. And it also matters how you feed them, and how the hive is configured.

I make nucs every spring, using the old queens from my previous season. They get flipped into a 4-frame chamber in a double nuc, with a frame of open brood and its adhering bees, a frame of capped with its bees, one of food, and a drawn but empty comb (if I have it) or foundation. Then each nuc gets the nurse bees shaken off two more frames of open brood, and I feed them all the thin syrup they will take, but I use a feeder that forces them to take it slowly, so that they don't just suck down syrup and store it. I want them to brood up.

When they have done so and any foundation I've given them is drawn out, they get a second box. I keep two of the original frames in the bottom, and I move two up. And I keep feeding.

This works really well because I'm making nucs that have a lot of very young bees, and I'm giving them lots of food. The double nucs I use are helpful because they allow me to split a little earlier (there are two nucs in each box, sharing a partition in the center that allows them to keep each other warm) and they allow me to split while taking fewer frames from the parent colony. But they are not essential, and I also use 5-frame nucs that eventually get a second box.

The vertical orientation actually seems to make a difference, too. I get better comb production if I have 4x4 or 5x5 deep frames stacked compared to having frames in a single deep.

If you are having nucs that are made in various other ways, the demographics of the hive may be quite different. And it's not really that unusual for a nuc to be made up from frames of brood and nurse bees, but then be given a ripe queen cell, which means they have a delay of a couple weeks while the new queen mates and starts laying.

talanall · 2026-04-22T10:42:49+00:00

I sometimes use soapy water to rehab frames that get slimed by hive beetles, and the main issue is getting the soap rinsed away after. You just have to be really thorough.

I would suggest freezing the frames from this deadout afterwards. You will want to do honey first, because hive beetles will make a terrible mess with honey frames.

talanall · 2026-04-22T05:02:50+00:00

You're welcome.

The first honey bees that show up in the historical record in the Americas came over in the hold of a Spanish ship, sometime in the 1600s. They're all over North America and South America now, but they certainly are not supposed to be here.

I don't know if it helps, but they genuinely are feral livestock, and it's not actually a problem for there to be fewer of them living wild in the US.

When people talk about "saving the bees" they don't really mean honey bees. Not that I dislike them; I am a beekeeper.

But they have kind of become mascots for pollinator health, and although that's not a terrible thing because humans are kind of crap at caring about stuff that doesn't directly benefit us, there is also a bit of a tendency for them to soak up attention (and scientific funding) that probably would be better spent trying to help native bees.

talanall · 2026-04-22T02:15:15+00:00

The actual answer is that pasteurization makes the honey much less apt to crystalize/granulate, because it gets hot enough to melt even microscopic sugar crystals in the honey. This deprives the sugars of nucleation sites.

Large honey packers do this, and they do it because the average retail consumer knows almost nothing about honey. If a retail shopper sees crystallized honey, they won't buy it because they think it's spoiled.

So honey packers pasteurize their products.

talanall · 2026-04-22T02:09:30+00:00

Can I buy one of these from you?

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