Controlled swarm splitting and the old queen
In your September 2025 issue (Volume 165, No. 9) you printed an interesting article by Kevin J. Gross, “A Controlled Swarm Splitting Method for Increasing Colony Count While Maximizing Honey Production.”
As a follow-up question a year later, we were wondering what they see as far as queen supersedure in their feral-derivative bees, in that as they take the old queen away, will she be split away again the following year? Or is this something the bees take care of as they see fit?
Is removing the old queen and letting both splits rear queen cells ever done? I would assume they might just let the bees decide on the old queen’s health and replacement. I was just curious what they see or if they have noticed any pattern in old queen replacement.
Stephen Lambright
New York Mills, Minnesota
Kevin responds:
Thank you, Stephen, for your interest and for the very good questions. While we haven’t formally collected data regarding the supersedure rate — nor do we mark our queens, so we can’t be sure — we have noticed that the old queen with the split is often superseded prior to summer. This is not surprising, as we are mimicking the natural reproductive swarm process, and it is generally thought that swarms frequently supersede their queen once established.
In our case, the old queen would have already been responsible for brooding the latter half of the previous spring, the previous fall, and the buildup period for the current spring. Should the old queen not get superseded, then she would be split out again the following year. We do allow the colonies to make the decisions regarding supersedure. We do not allow the small split to rear a new emergency queen, preferring instead to let the parent colony do that — advantaging the parent with staying in the original location, keeping the foragers, and retaining a majority of the population at the time of splitting.
As mentioned in the article, we perform our splits just as swarming begins in our area, so pollen and nectar are in abundance, as well as plenty of drones.
Blowing on bees
To Tina Sebestyen,
A question was asked: Blowing on bees upsets? You can look back at your response. The truth is, the act of blowing on bees causes a rush of carbon dioxide. The bees correct this rush by wing fanning which causes air circulation that corrects the unbalance. It’s a roar actually. I use “blowing into the colony” quite often in the winter. A time when no bees are seen and one wonders — are there any bees left? Blow through the feeder or inner cover opening. You’ll get a response. If you hear a roar, you leave happy. If not, bring your boxes home and use them in the spring. Hope this helps with the bad-breath response. Love reading the letters.
Stan the bee man Frick
Harrisburg, North Carolina
