Swarm prevention is intended to stopping the bees from even preparing to swarm.
Swarming happens when the hive is rilly crowded, there is a lot of congestion in the hive and there is not enough queen pheromone going around the hive. The bees respond by raising new queens and they will swarm prior to hatching of the new queens. As a bee keeper, you rilly dont want your bees to swarm because this reduces on the production.
Hive inspection
When inspecting the hives, check if the bees are rising any other queen cells and if they are, remove and kill the queen cells. To differentiate between queen caps and queen cells, queen caps are empty while the queen cells have either an egg, larvae or pupa.
Prevention of swarming
When monitoring the hives, label the hives with the number of frames of bees each has. This helps you to know which colony to go back and inspect for swarms and which one needs supering earlier.
One means of preventing swarming is by adding more space to the bees. This is done by adding more supers. Having a young queen in the colony also helps prevent swarming.
There are certain strains of bees that have low tendency o swarm. It is advisable to rear these kinds of bees.
