Sharing our experience with our hives this spring, and invite any comments on decisions we made with our hives, further guidance, etc.
We have two overwintered hives, let's call them #1 and #2. Both strong, #1 very strong. #1 swarmed on April 10, ahead of any prep we had planned to do to prevent swarming. We caught the swarm though and they have stuck around. #1 had a secondary swarm on April 18, and a tertiary swarm yesterday April 19 (we know now that we should have gone into #1 after they swarmed the first time). We caught both these swarms as well. We went into #1 yesterday, found no queen, no eggs, but additional swarm cells and emergency cells? (queen cells hanging off bottom of frames, and queen cells hanging in center of frames). We decided to remove all queen cells, and then combined the tertiary swarm with #1 via the newspaper method. We also removed two frames capped brood from #1 and gave them, and some bees, to the secondary swarm (which was small).
Yesterday we also went into #2. We again found no queen, no eggs, but some swarm cells and emergency cells. We wonder if this hive also has already swarmed and we missed it. We created an artificial swarm nucleus colony with all the frames with swarm cells, and left two emergency queen cells in #2.
This is our first year with overwintered hives, and despite all the great info the club has provided on preemptive splits, we weren't able to practice any of it and were caught completely off guard by these early swarms. We plan to watch our crabapple tree next year and when it starts to bloom, will try to go into any overwintered hives.
We also were feeling unsure about when/if to do deep reversal on these hives. Our plan was to reverse (if appropriate) and split at the same time, but curious on how others handle this. If we had reversed the deeps sooner, could that also have helped prevent swarming?
Thank you!
Rachel and Daniel (Skyline, Tillamook)
p.s. Thank you to Claire, Rick S, Brad, Patsy and Debbie for helpful advice with our situation!