Clearwater Chicken
Songster
yep, this is very true. this year from my hive i took 5 frames of eggs and brood and put it in a nuc box to prevent swarming (hopefully). And to get another hive. they are currently raising their own queens. I have decided to not buy any more bees (except maybe queens). and just split, divide, and combine my own hives to ensure I always have a couple of hives. my goal is to have around 5 hives constantly so I don't lose it all if a few hives crash. then I can either continue to split and divide my hives to give me more or split them into nucs and sell the nucs locally. if you don't split the hive or artificially swarm it it will likely swarm.The colony will make new queen cells for itself and raise a number of queens when the nectar flow (abundant) and hive size (too small) stimulate them to do so. The new queens will gather bees to themselves and swarm (leave the hive to start a new colony). Sometimes several swarms may emerge in a short period of time. The worker bees will raise up new queens and when ready, will sting the old queen to death and replace her with a new queen.
If a beekeeper wants to change the character of his hive to (for example) make it better-adapted to survive in his climate, he may kill the current queen and introduce a new queen of the type he would like to nudge his colony toward. The queen is the mother of her entire hive and also completely dependent on them for her survival, feeding, grooming, etc. She spends her whole life laying eggs. When she slows down her production, the workers will replace and destroy her--but she still lives much longer than the average worker bee.
This is all just book-learning, so take it with the spirit of the skeptic, but the point is that, however abhorrent it may seem to us, killing the queen to replace her with a more genetically suitable queen isn't an unusual event in the life of the hive.