New understanding. Wonderful!!! Probably one of my problems last year, maybe did not provide enough room for honey, the queen became honeybound, and the obvious!! No room for lots of brood? Is this the gist of it? What does she do if there is no room for eggs? Probably swarm? But I did not have any swarms occur:
Except, a rather nasty swarm that I had caught the year before. It was so cranky!!!! The moment you even went close to their humble home, the aura surrounding this hive was demonous!!! They did not want you near for sure. Anyways, I did work with them, (lots of protection) and they were very prolific the first year and first part of second year. Then one day they decided that they would take off for better places. I watched them go, I followed as best that I could, along with a bunch of kids and my sister. We saw them go up in a great big old cottonwood and that was the end of them. No way on the good green earth could I have reached that far, and personally did not want to -- I actually did not mind one little bit, but in my mind I wished them well. It was not their fault that they were so crabby, it was nothing that I had done. I had every intention of requeening this colony, but just never got around to it. So good riddence to bad rubbish. I was glad to see them leave in a way.
I had cut out some mature queen cells from another hive shortly before this swarm took off because I was going to attach them to a frame in a queenless colony I had. (I would do it differently this year for sure though). I had the queen cells in a little warm box, all tucked in. When I went to open it, there was a queen walking around in the little box. So I put her in a queen cage, stuffed a little marshmallow in the end and put it in the colony. Good, they had their new queen. The colony did well. And I actually still find it hard to believe to this day, but this colony actually over a period of time became far less cranky. That was nice, I did not feel intimidated by them by the end of the summer and they produced excess honey. But, that is a colony that I lost due to varroa destruction. Great day. Cindi