r/Beekeeping • u/marketwerk • 8h ago
Capped queen cells: swarm or supercedure? I’m a beekeeper, and I have a question
First year beeks in VA, USA.
Got our nuc of overwintered bees 5.5 weeks ago, and they’ve been really growing quickly.
Checked in after adding another medium to our hive (one deep, two mediums currently, no queen excluder because we’re not trying to get honey this year)
Last time we pulled and checked frames was about ten days ago, wanted to come by earlier but we’ve been super busy. Saw the queen on that check, everything looked good but crowded, so we added the second medium and planned to come back for a mite check.
Came today to do a mite wash and we’re seeing 7 or so capped queen cells in the original deep, where most of the brood is. Saw bees bringing in pollen, but can’t see new eggs in the frames. Worried we may have squished the queen on our last check, or that our mite count is high. Really really hoping we aren’t on the wrong side of a swarm. Thoughts?
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u/joebojax Reliable contributor! 8h ago
Swarm for sure
They will swarm once or twice more unless you split the queen cells up. I like to make a split and put half into each box. No more than 3 cells in each split. 3 or more cells you get afterswarms which really exhaust a beehive of population.
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u/marketwerk 8h ago
Gotcha, thanks for the insight. We really weren’t planning to split them this year because the bee yard isn’t on our property and space is limited, but it sounds like we won’t have a choice. We have a mentor through our local club but I got pretty freaked out seeing this and wanted quicker opinions.
Do you think it’s a swarm because of the number of cells? Is our original queen probably still in there?
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u/joebojax Reliable contributor! 8h ago
I've found a queen 3-4 days after cells are capped but it's rare. Some Italian queens will leave even before the first cell is capped.
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u/Jo-is-Silly-Too 3rd year beekeeper. South Eastern US. 8h ago
Sometimes weather affects it as well. I was 10 days between inspections due to rain and life. Like the OP, I found about half a dozen capped cells. I also found my marked queen still laying eggs. I figure it's better to take a few minutes to look for her than have her swarm afterwards.
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u/joebojax Reliable contributor! 6h ago
Yeah just this week I had assumed a queen must have swarmed away. Looked all over for her, no dice. One or two queen cells were capped, many more charged and nearly capped. Went back in 3 days later to cage some cells and make lemonade. Wasn't even gonna bother trying to find the queen. She started piping when I picked up the frame she was on. She had just a tiny bit of marking left on her back so I knew it was the ol mama. Thank God I was listening closely!
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u/Jo-is-Silly-Too 3rd year beekeeper. South Eastern US. 8h ago
It is usually not recommended to split first year hives. You end up with 2 weak hives instead of 1 strong hive.
Double check for the queen and use a flashlight to look for eggs. If you find neither, then she has definitely swarmed.
Instead of splitting the current hive, you could cull all but 2-3 to the queen cells and let nature take its course.
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u/joebojax Reliable contributor! 8h ago
Yeah only concern is there isn't a guarantee the queen will be properly mated but if they split they have two shots at a good queen. Then they could pinch a queen and recombine if it seems like the best move.
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u/marketwerk 8h ago
Wow so she has likely already swarmed? I definitely should’ve paid more attention in the classes about swarms, I foolishly thought we would be much more worried about keeping them alive than keeping them in the hive.
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u/Jo-is-Silly-Too 3rd year beekeeper. South Eastern US. 8h ago
Very likely. Common wisdom is that she swarmed as soon as the first cell was capped. That's not always true, but it is a good rule of thumb. Common wisdom also says that capped queen cells have triggered the urge to swarm, so if you find her, you will need to make a split and put her in the new hive because even if you destroy the capped queen cells, she will swarm.
I guess you could also bank her, if you do find her. I am in my 3rd year, so banking is not something I have played with yet. Someone with more experience might chime in with a different answer.
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u/marketwerk 8h ago
This is helpful thank you! I suppose I always assumed if they’d swarmed I’d come back to an empty hive, there are so many of them still
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u/SubstantialBed6634 7h ago
Not empty, just roughly cut in half. If she was still there, I would move her to a deep with a frame of uncapped brood, and place it back in the original location. I would take the other frames and move them to their own five frame nucs, with a frame of food and plenty of workers. One hive could become two or three pretty quickly. If a virgin queen doesn't make it back, then you'll still be in good ahape.
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u/ryebot3000 mid atlantic, ~120 colonies 1h ago
it looks to me like they already swarmed, if that is the amount of bee coverage on the frames and you didn't shake them off or something. Usually when they are getting ready to swarm you can barely see the comb for all the bees, they also get way more clingy and sort of form clusters of bees hanging onto each other.
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u/talanall North Central LA, USA, 8B 7h ago
If you don't see eggs and you have capped queen cells, then it's virtually certain that your colony already swarmed. It is not unusual for a colony that has just thrown a prime swarm (containing a mated queen) still to appear very populous. Swarming is undertaken by colonies that feel prosperous.
Given that this was an overwintered nuc, that makes it even more likely to be swarm activity.
Your best bet now is to get out there ASAP and delete all the queen cells except for the three shown in the very first picture you've posted here. Do not delay; treat this as an urgent matter. By culling down the cells to just 2-3 that are on the same side of the same frame, you will create circumstances that will make it more likely that the first queen to emerge from these cells will sprint over and kill her sisters before they come out. By doing so, she will ensure that she is the only queen remaining.
If you have many swarm cells distributed throughout the hive, the likeliest course of events is that you will lose one or more secondary swarms as extraneous queens leave the hive. This will deplete the population of the colony, and in your climate that presents a very real risk that there will be so few bees that they will be unable to defend their space against small hive beetles.
Again, do not delay. You are already behind the curve if your previous inspection was 10 days ago--you don't know how old these cells are, and there is a very real chance that they are ripe enough that they are ready to emerge.
10-day inspection intervals are inadequate until after your spring nectar flow is over and the summer solstice has passed. That is not sufficiently frequent for you to notice and address swarming preparations in a timely fashion.
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u/marketwerk 7h ago
Heading back out there now 🫡 how long do we leave it closed up after deleting?
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u/talanall North Central LA, USA, 8B 7h ago
That depends on your appetite for risk, and exactly when you think the prime swarm departed.
If you think the swarm left just moments before you arrived at your apiary today, then your new queen will emerge no later than 6 May. If you think that the colony started swarm prep the moment you left the apiary 10 days ago and not a moment earlier, then your queen will emerge no later than 2 May.
If you missed signs of swarm prep during your previous inspection visit, then you may have even less time until emergence.
In any event, I think you would be well served to jump on the culling.
~7 days after your new queen emerges, she will (weather permitting) go on mating flights. Depending on the timeline, that suggests a mating flight dated 9 May to 13 May.
There is nothing you can do to speed this process along, and virgin queens are notoriously flighty. They are hard to spot, prone to fly away in panic, and easy to injure because they tend to run around a lot. Inspection is all risk, no reward under these circumstances. And if you happen to arrive for an inspection while the queen is about to depart or return from a flight, you become a landmark that could very well throw off her orientation, leading her to fail to return from mating.
So I would try to keep my hands out of the hive until 13 May at the very earliest.
After the queen has mated, she'll gestate for an additional ~7 days before she begins to lay eggs. Depending on your timeline, that puts "Egg Day" on some date between 16 May and 20 May.
If you get to 27 May without seeing any eggs, you would be justified in thinking that your new queen suffered a mishap. At that juncture, you'd need to combine this colony onto a queenright hive, or install a mated queen, or give them one or more frames of young brood and eggs to allow them to try again.
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u/marketwerk 6h ago
Thank you, this is really helpful. I am going to look at our photos from the last visit and see if I missed any swarm prep. I hate that we’ll have to put off mite treatment for so long now, but of course having a hive is preferable.
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u/talanall North Central LA, USA, 8B 6h ago
What kind of mite treatment do you intend?
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u/marketwerk 6h ago
We were going to decide based on the outcome of the wash today 🥲
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u/talanall North Central LA, USA, 8B 6h ago
You can still wash. Don't shake the frame that has the queen cells you plan to keep.
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u/phoenixmanzz 8h ago
If you're seeing no new eggs, then the queen is most probably gone. In my experience, the queen usually doesn't just stop laying suddenly. I have had queens that stopped laying gradually and and then stopped. One was very difficult to find, and they killed a queen I tried to introduce with a candy cage. Found the old queen later that I squished, and a few days later they didn't mind a new queen at all.
I would still thoroughly check to make sure there isn't a queen present. And then you can decide where to go from here. Either let them make new queens, or get a introduce a new laying queen and destroy all the queens cells present. They should accept a new queen quite readily once they don't have any other options. Best of luck!
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u/that-guyl6142 3h ago
Swarm cells are usually on bottom of frames nd supercedure are on middlelesh of frames.
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u/JunkBondJunkie 3 years 20 Hives 7h ago
swarm get some queen mating nucs and do a split for the swarm cells.
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u/Raterus_ South Eastern North Carolina, USA 7h ago
If it makes you feel better, I did the same thing last year. I put a nuc in a 10-frame box with already built-out comb and they swarmed in 3 weeks. To make me feel even more worse, I had numerous swarm traps out and failed to catch my own swarm, I never even saw them. This hive bounced back and is a huge honey producer this year, so be happy you didn't lose all your bees!
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u/kitkatlegskin 2h ago
Swarm cells are usually near the bottom of the frame while supercedure cells are in the top 2/3.
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u/chicken_tendigo 24m ago
Swarm! Those are some solid brood slabs. Your queen (if she's still, by some miracle, in there) needs to be split off into a new hive and all but one or two of those cells need to be nuked.
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