Clare Densley and Martin Hann from Buckfast answer your beekeeping queries.

Clare  This sounds very similar to my second year as a beekeeper. I do remember the sense of achievement I felt hiving my first swarm, and also my feelings of utter failure when I lost my first colony over winter. However, to address your first question: I don’t think that you have a particularly swarmy line of bees just because they swarmed multiple times.

Martin  It’s normal for a strong colony to follow the prime swarm (the first one) with a series of cast swarms during a good year. The reasons a colony swarms may be many, and too complicated to detail here, so let’s just say that your colony was strong before it swarmed. There were lots of bees, lots of brood, lots of food and lots of queen cells. Swarming is colony reproduction. Each swarm which leaves the hive is an insurance policy in case some of them don’t make it. They aren’t all expected to survive, but if a few do, the collective genes of the colony will be passed on into the next generation.

Clare  I learned that the first virgin emerging after the prime swarm left would kill the remaining virgins in their cells.

Martin  I learned that too. I also remember thinking that if half the colony had gone off with the swarm, there wouldn’t be enough bees for them to swarm again.

Clare  It’s incredible how quickly the colony population replenishes after a swarm leaves. Before the swarm departs, there is usually a large amount of sealed brood on the verge of emerging. So, I don’t think that you have particularly swarmy bees. In some years this is normal.

Martin  If you don’t want the hive to carry on swarming, you will need to cull the superfluous cells and leave just one. This is probably a better strategy than catching all the small cast swarms and putting them in separate hives. Remember that you will need to do a second cull of queen cells about a week later in case they make emergency cells – you can read up about why they make these.

Clare  Alternatively, you could dump all the casts into one hive and let them sort it out. You can add cast swarms as they come out over a period of time. They will have a better chance of survival as a larger unit than as lots of small colonies. There may be a bit of fighting, but eventually they will sort it out and the resulting colony may be robust enough to get through the winter if the remaining virgin mates successfully.

Martin  So, to the second part of your question. The original colony will be left with a single virgin which has to get mated. Looking at the photo there seem to be only capped drone cells so it seems yours didn’t mate successfully and so it became a drone layer. There isn’t much you can do to help it because it’s dwindled down to almost nothing. Let her go!

Clare  You still have two good colonies – the one with your original queen (the first swarm you hived) and a cast swarm colony. So start the season by making sure that they are looked after and given plenty of space early enough in spring. This won’t prevent swarming – there are lots of reasons for this – but it will stop them from doing it because of overcrowding. Clean up the gear from your dead-out and read up about swarming. Wally Shaw’s books: An Apiary Guide to Swarm Control (published by Northern Bee books) and Swarming biology and Control (published by Bee Craft) are excellent.

Martin  There are two species of wax moth, Achroia grisella, the lesser wax moth, and Galleria mellonella, the greater wax moth. Both can be serious pests in beehives, being responsible for the destruction of wax combs particularly in weaker colonies or stored supers. It’s only the larval stage which is responsible for this damage as the adults are unable to feed due to their atrophied mouthparts.

Clare  You mean the moths don’t eat anything?

Martin   This is common for lots of insects. Mayflies only live for 24 hours; they don’t have any mouthparts and so they just mate; the females lay eggs and then they die.

Clare  So, the larval stage is the part of their lifecycle where they eat and grow before metamorphosis?

Martin  The larvae consume honey, nectar, pollen, and beeswax as they eat their way through the combs. They tend to go for ones which had brood in them because of the protein-rich remains of honey bee pupal skins – and poo – left behind when they moult. The speed of the lifecycle from larvae to moth depends on the quality of this nutrition and the temperature of the environment, anything from four weeks to six months.

Clare  I read somewhere that wax moth larvae don’t infest clean wax, but I’ve seen the telltale frass, the digestive waste, on unused foundation and even on some wax candles and ornaments we have on our shelves.

Martin  While they are able to survive on a clean wax diet, they need the protein from the honey bee larvae skins that are shed and the cocoons embedded in the brood cells to allow them
to pupate.

Clare  Why do they appear to eat into the wood of the hive bodies then? Are they digesting that too?

Martin  Wood is a composite material comprising cellulose fibres and lignin. There are many insect species whose larval stage feeds on wood, but they only digest the cellulose part. However, some of them deconstruct the lignin either mechanically or chemically to get to the cellulose. When wax moth larvae faecal matter was examined, it was found to contain a majority of lignin suggesting that it passed straight through them mainly undigested.

Clare  So, this little boat shaped furrow seems to be just a kind of cradle for the cocoon to be attached to, and the wood excavated by the larvae passes through them unchanged? Really, it’s just a means to an end rather than a food source.

Martin  I suppose there would be plenty of protected cracks and fissures for the larvae to nestle into before spinning their silk cocoons in a tree cavity, but a smooth walled hive obviously needs some modification to achieve this.

Clare  I’ve heard that they could eat plastic.

Martin  There’s some well-publicised research from Brandon University in Canada about the wax moth larvae’s ability to digest some plastics by using enzymes in their saliva. It may seem odd to us that any creature can gain some nutritional benefit from plastic, but apparently, it’s all to do with the CH2-CH2 bond. My organic chemistry is pretty rusty but this type of bond which is found in polyethylene plastic is the same (or very similar) to that found in beeswax.

Clare  An update on that research says that, although they can break down plastic by oxidising the molecules, they don’t actually gain any nutritional benefit from it and so aren’t technically eating it – just modifying it. If they were just given this as sustenance, they would fade away and die from malnutrition. Do you think that they actually eat wax, or is it just being modified and passing through in the same way as polythene or lignin?

Martin  You mean the larval moults and poo is the main nutrition for them, not the actual wax?

Clare  Yes. I’ve just found a paper which suggests this.

Martin  To be fair, the wax moth damage in clean beeswax is never extensive, just annoying.

Further reading

www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33127-w

www.one5c.com/plastic-eating-worms-136931560

www.beelistener.co.uk/diseases/honey-bee-pests-lesser-wax-moths