Swarm preparation?

[reedyfork]

Anyone seeing signs yet of colonies preparing to swarm? Of course, this is the first year I had huge plans to split using swarm cells (since I'm always battling swarming every other spring), and here we are on March 11 and absolutely ZERO of my colonies look like they are necessarily close! They are certainly huge, full of brood, with drones, and could definitely be split NOW, but I really don't want to go the "emergency queen" route.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's going to take advantage this week, so I'd love to know what others are seeing.

[TooBusy]

I did top to bottom inspections in my 2 hives yesterday. Tons of brood, eggs, and larvae at all stages, thankfully no queen cells.
Some drones in the hive and hundreds of capped drone cells. We're getting close...

[Wally]

Beez Needz found queen cells yesterday and made a split. March 12. 2025. Get ready. They are coming.

[Jacobs]

One of my bait hives at the house is being examined. It may not be chosen, but there is definite interest in it.

[Jacobs]

I went through 3 of the stronger looking hives at my house yesterday afternoon. The one that over wintered in 2-10 frame mediums was in swarm mode with multiple queen cells. None of the cells were capped and several were damaged when I separated supers to have a look at bottom bars of frames. I did leave some queen cells undamaged. My queen is marked, so it was easy to locate her and move her into a nuc along with 2 brood frames, 2 frames of food and a frame of open drawn comb. I hope, but don't fully expect that this will stop the original hive from swarming. It might.

[Jacobs]

I found 1 more of the house hives in swarm mode today. I was able to move the marked queen into a nuc and will wait to see what happens.

[reedyfork]

Same here! I found my three strong home hives all in swarm mode yesterday. No capped cells yet, but a few that are very close. Luckily, I caught them just in time, found all three marked queens, and made multiple splits.

One of these had already drawn an entire deep this past month, was sitting in three deeps, and they had brood in all three boxes. All new empty cells were filled with nectar. I'm getting honey supers on everyone today!

[royl]

I have a feeling it will be very soon for GBO. My friend south of GBO has many capped queen cells in his hive and plans to use the Demaree method to resolve it.

[Jacobs]

I have 2 bait hives being scouted at the house this afternoon. The one I posted about on March 13th is getting more interest than it did then. The other bait hive is in the tulip poplar I had cut to a 10 foot post last year (viewtopic.php?t=2668). I have a bait hive sitting on a tree stand with the entrance about 7 feet up.