Swarm Management, Hazelwood

A couple weeks ago, we inspected the hive at Hazelwood.The colony is building up fast--they seem to like it there! When we inspected, the drone/mite trap frame was capped so we removed it and replaced it with a medium frame with foundation (you can see the pictures of it here). There were other indications that the hive was preparing to swarm: there were a couple queen cups with egg and larva and the super was full of brood. To address the possibility of a swarm, we added a super of mixed empty comb and foundation frames both above and below the super with brood (compare the pictures below). Additionally, because the lower hive body had empty frames and was less active than the upper hive body, we reversed the hive bodies and removed 3 frames of brood, which we contributed to the nucs that we are establishing. We checked back in a week and found the queen—the tactics seemed to have worked. You can compare pictures of before (in the Pop City article) and after (when we checked back on the hive a week later).