Have prepared a second brood box with foundation and/or drawn comb.Timing of the manipulations (if one or more new queen is desired).Having a marked queen to aid the finding and isolation of her.Recognising the signs of imminent swarming or carrying out regular (7 day) inspection from April onward to find queen cells.Preparedness (having the necessary extra equipment ready in advance).The key to the success of the Snelgrove method are: Each pair has an entrance above and below the board.A Snelgrove board with 3 pairs of entrances.The timings of the entrance manipulations are only critical where the beekeeper wishes to use the technique to raise one or more new queens. The entrances could be opened and closed in a sequence that resulted in newly flying bees being “bled” back down into the main productive hive. Snelgrove’s modification was to incorporate three pairs of entrances each pair having one entrance above and one below the board. The snelgrove board is largely based on other boards which had been around since the late 19th century. The bees’ scent however can still pass through the entire hive via a patch of mesh in the centre of the snelgrove board. Snelgrove’s original idea was to use his board to provide the queen with extra laying space whilst maintaining all the bees at full strength in the hive, ultimately as one colony.Īlthough this modified method has similarities to the demaree method, unlike the latter which maintains an open structure to the hive where bees (other than the queen) can move freely between boxes, snelgrove uses the board to provide complete separation of the bees. Once the colony is split, one box sits above the others in a vertical arrangement. This method, which can be performed pre-emptively or once queen cells have appeared, involves the temporary separation of the queen and flying bees from the eggs, brood and nurse bees in two separate brood boxes within the same hive. The method described below attempts to outline the most simple use of the snelgrove board as a method of swarm control. Therefore, there is no one specific “snelgrove method”, but instead a common theme based on using a snelgrove board to manage swarming. However, in his book, he later describes variations that would control swarming and techniques for making increase. Leonard Snelgrove’s new board was originally intended for swarm prevention (like the demaree method), where the beekeeper would judge when the bees were about ready to swarm before performing the manipulation. ![]() Leonard Snelgrove introduced his specific design of board that makes use of entrances above and below the board to “bleed” bees from one box to another. It follows on from decades of hive manipulation using various kinds of board to separate queen from brood. ![]() The Snelgrove method was first described by Leonard E Snelgrove in his 1934 book, “Swarming – It’s Control and Prevention”.
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