Hi, I’m Stewart Spinks and welcome to Episode 85 of my podcast, Beekeeping Short and Sweet, It’s the road to recovery for me and our regular monthly Questions and Answers session for everyone else!

Firstly, Thank you, everyone, for your kind thoughts regarding my back problems, I’m hopeful that things are starting to settle down and normal service will soon be back. It’s been a frustrating period of time for me, and I really appreciate everyone’s messages of support, your patience and also some of those suggested remedies! But enough of my bad back, let’s get straight into the questions.

First up is from Fran Barham

My question is about the Thornes 'Wasp Out' hive entrances.  I have three on my hives right now and they have done a great job to prevent robbing and wasp ingress.  Do you think I can leave these on over winter instead of putting on mouse guards?

Hi Fran,Nice to hear the Wasp Out entrances have served you well, I’m not familiar with them but checking them out online they look like a piece of plastic conduit channel attached to the entrance block. I guess as long as they’re not affected by the cold weather they should be fine.

The entrance just needs to be shallow enough to prevent the mice from being able to squeeze themselves inside and judging by the images online I think the wasp out entrance will do the job perfectly well.

Eva Loysen

Hello Stewart

My question is about a very full to bursting hive - I'm convinced they will swarm on the first warm day of the Spring, so please could you advise how to prepare for an artificial swarm to prevent this, and how early could I do this? Many thanks and all good wishes.

Hi Eva,Thanks for the question and it’s nice to see someone preparing for Spring already.

The good news is that you have plenty of time to prepare for Spring swarms next season and although your colony looks huge now there will be a significant reduction in size over Winter and as such the colony will need to rebuild in the Spring prior to swarming.

Keep an eye on them over Winter and watch as they start to develop again in the early months of next year.

Remember also, that colonies won’t swarm until there are plenty of drones around for the new virgin queens to mate with so a really good indication that colonies are getting ready is the early production of drone cells. Talking of which, all the books will tell you the drones get kicked out over Winter but I don’t think that’s always the case, I’ve seen drones in colonies, and no, before anyone out there posts me a message, it wasn’t a drone laying queen! So, keep a careful watch for drones. Having said all that, to answer your question, an artificial swarm simply removes two of the three parts of a near swarming colony, those three parts being the Queen, the flying bees and the brood.

You simply move the old hive to one side, add a new hive, move the queen on a frame with empty cells into the new hive fill it up with foundation and allow all the flying bees to go back to her.

In the old hive, you can no do several things, if there are eggs, you could remove all the queen cells and have the remaining bees produce a new batch, this puts you in control of the timings. Alternatively, you could remove all bar one of the queen cells and let this queen emerge. You could also split the brood down into nucs and give each one a sealed queen cell. I did this earlier in the year this season and produced six nucs from one colony and I’m glad to say that all are thriving and ready for the Winter.

I hope that gives you a flavour of how it works, I do have several videos showing the process and I have a memory jogger pdf that I can post for you to download.

Next up is Robert McDonald

I'm busy planning expansion for next year and working out what I need to buy. Do you bother