MORE CARE NEEDED BY AFTER SWARMS WHEN HIVED.
Should it be thought best to hive after swarms, and risk the chances, they should receive a little extra attention after the first week or two, to destroy the worms; a little timely care may prevent considerable injury. They are apt to construct more combs in proportion to the number of bees, than others; consequently, such combs cannot be properly covered and protected. The moth has an opportunity to deposit her eggs on them, and, sometimes, entirely destroy them.
Whenever these swarms issue near enough together, it is best to unite them. I have said second swarms were generally half as large as the first. By this rule, two second swarms would contain as many bees as a first one, and four of the third, or one of the second issue, and two of the third, &c. If the first and second are of the ordinary size, I think it advisable always to return the third. But in large apiaries it is common for them to issue without any previous warning, just when a first one is leaving, and crowd themselves into their company, and seeming to be as much at home as though they were equally respectable.
Whenever the hives containing our swarms are full or very near it, the boxes should be put on without delay, unless the season of honey is so nearly gone as to make it unnecessary.
I have found it an advantage to hive a few of these very small swarms, on purpose to preserve queens, to supply some old stocks that sometimes lose their own at the extreme end of the swarming season. The cases to be mentioned at the last of the next chapter. I try and save one for about every twenty stocks that have swarmed.
Swarms that lose their queen the first few hours after being hived, generally return to the parent stock; with the exception that they sometimes unite with some other. If much time has elapsed before the loss, they remain, unless standing on the same bench with another. On a separate stand they continue their labor, but a large swarm diminishes rapidly, and seldom fills an ordinary-sized hive. One singular circumstance attends a swarm that is constructing combs without a queen. I have never seen it noticed by any one, and may not always be the case, but _every_ instance that has come under my notice, I have so found it. That is, four-fifths of the combs are drone-cells; why they thus construct them is another subject for speculation, from which I will endeavor in this instance to refrain.