Looking for the signs of swarm preparations on the frames will give you some advance warning, but as you move into the main swarm season, you may also want to make sure you aren’t missing any new developments between full inspections. After all, the signs on the frames can sometimes be quite subtle and it’s a lot of work, not to mention very disturbing to the bees, to pull and repeatedly examine all the brood frames.

Queen cells on a frame.

Queen cells on a frame.

Photo credit Steve Repasky, courtesy Bee Culture Magazine, www.beeculture.com Used with permission.

There is one, unmistakable sign that a swarm is in the works: a bunch of developing queen cells hanging down along the lower edges of the frames. This is a late-stage sign, so it means your hive is very close to swarming. Since finding swarm cells on the frame edges doesn’t give you much advance warning, you must do these checks repeatedly, on short intervals. A five-day interval is a good target, leaving you a little margin for weather delays. Even regular inspections every weekend may not catch things in time if you are delayed, even for just a day. That’s because a queen cell is capped on the eighth day after the egg was laid. And once the first queen cell is capped (and occasionally, just before), the swarm departs.

Fortunately, doing a tip-up swarm check is easy and fast, not requiring removal of any frames. You simply tip up each brood box and look at the underside of all the frames at once.

If there are queen cells on the frames, a swarm is only days away – perhaps even less than a day. So, you also need to have a plan for what you’ll do to forestall a swarm, if you find one ready to go.

How to safely tip up a box to look for swarm cells

Before you start, it's important to have your smoker close by, so that you can easily reach it without having to take a step. To safely tip up a box, follow these steps:

  1. Lift off any supers, and set them aside, taking care to keep them level and flat to avoid losing fresh nectar. Putting them down on a temporary base, or even on an upside-down outer cover, is a good practice.

  2. If you're using a queen excluder, pry it off and set it down on top of the supers if you also have more than one brood box to look through. You don't want to inadvertently move the queen to the supers while doing the swarm check. Alternatively, you could also use two temporary stacks, one of supers and one of brood boxes, to keep things totally separate.

  3. Loosen the uppermost brood box all around so that it will move easily when you’re ready to do the tip-up.

  4. Stand at the rear of the hive and lift the back end of the top box up a few inches, while simultaneously pulling it towards you a couple of inches. This dual motion means the box, which may be heavy, will not slip off the opposite (front) end.

  5. Next, tilt the box up high enough so you can look underneath and see the bottom edges of the frames. Once the box is away from the front edge, you can easily - and safely - control it with just one hand. You may need some smoke to shift the bees away so you can see if there are any queen cups or queen cells along the lower edges of the frames. 

Tip-up swarm check.

Want to watch the action of a tip-up swarm check before you give it try? Click here to go to our YouTube channel to see it done.If you see queen cells you will need to make a full inspection to get an idea of how far along the swarm preparations are, or even if the hive has already swarmed. And it is likely you’ll need to make an immediate split to forestall a swarm, if one has not already occurred.

There are very likely to be dry queen cups. This doesn't necessarily mean that the bees are about to swarm. Queen cups are normal; the bees make them all the time. Use the tip of your hive tool to open any cup to check for an egg or the tell-tale glint of royal jelly. If you see either of these, that means it is no longer a queen cup, but rather a queen cell, containing a developing queen.

However, if there are no cups, or if all cups are still just cups and there are no signs of developing queen cells on the edges of any frames in the box, you're good to go. If there are other, lower, brood boxes, then you need to move this one off the hive, and do the same check in all of them.

When you’ve checked all frame edges, don’t just slide the box forward when you're ready to put it down. Doing so may decapitate bees clustered along the top of the lower box at the far end. If there are a lot of bees on the box below, or underneath the tilted box, another puff of smoke will move them safely into the frames. Then use the side handholds to return the box to horizontal and set it straight down. Replace any supers and close the hive up.

Does a tip-up type of swarm check replace a full inspection?

No, it's really meant as a means of doing more-frequent checks, in between inspections. This will help prevent "surprise" swarms, without the cost of excess disruption to the bees. Repeat the tip-ups about every five days until the main period of reproductive swarming has passed for your local area.

How can you tell if you've passed the period of swarm risk?

Is "white wax" the same as brood comb on top of the frames, between boxes? No, finding brood combs between the boxes means the bees are running out of room to lay and store nectar and should be given additional space immediately, preferably drawn comb. White wax has more of flat, lacy look on the tops of the frame, without being drawn into brood cells and it is often eye-catchingly white when compared to similar comb from previous years.

This can be a tricky thing; experience is the best guidance, along with local advice when you’re new. Many beekeepers use the appearance of a flush of white wax placed along the tops of the frames to tell them the bees are settling down into a big wax-making period. It’s believed that this means the wax-making-aged bees will be sticking around and adding more capacity for nectar storage and brood in the existing hive rather, than taking their skills on the road to a new one. And it’s also your cue to make sure they have plenty of room to practice their trade by adding undrawn frames for them to work on.

This is the time of year when you can get a startling amount of new comb drawn. Be sure to take advantage of that. Because aside from the reproductive type of swarming, which happens in the spring, you can also prompt a swarm due to simple overcrowding at any time of year. And the prevention of crowding starts with having lots of drawn-comb space available, both in the brood boxes and the supers. So, let ‘em knock themselves out drawing comb, while you rejoice that your bees are still in your hives and not in someone else’s swarm trap!