Is there any such thing as "Swarm prevention"?
I prefer to discuss colony guiding to a mutually satisfactorily outcome.
PH
I had a look at Ian's description - christ that's a long article!
So the board is a 'Snegrove lite' thing for a vertical split. Great that The Wife does not see yet another colony in the back garden compared to the classic artificial swarm that we read about. "You said that you were not going to get any more bees!"
To answer the OP, I would usually Demaree rather than using a solid board although I do have one and have used it on occasions - perhaps after using a Demaree for queenright queenraising and then keeping one of the queencells in the top box. It's then easy to make a separate colony using a solid board. (Can us a front entrance if it's a few feet from the main entrance of the lower colony). Once the queen has mated, the colony can be taken off the top. However when you have one colony on top of another, it makes inspection of the lower colony difficult.
Last edited by Adam; 11-04-2018 at 09:30 AM. Reason: unable to string a sentence togather.
A Snelgrove board gives you all the options. Just because it's got multiple openings doesn't mean you have use them all. Like a Swiss army penknife there is a tool for each situation.
Demaree is fine, but I find that unless I keep moving brood upstairs into the top brood box, the empty cells quickly get filled with honey as soon as the bees emerge. A board restricts the honey to the supers.
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