You can learn to produce your own queens using this small, but scalable system.

I’m a beginner.  This has been my second year raising queens – my third year keeping honey bees.  So  I am in no way pretending to be any kind of an expert – not only have I made many mistakes, but I expect to make many more next year.   As one beginner to another – I think I might have  some useful insights into getting started in queen rearing.

I’m going to give several  beginner-to-beginner tips in this article.  Things that might not be all that helpful to old hands but have really helped me.  Here’s the first – and I think, best:

Plan to practice  rearing queens when it’s easiest – during the main flow/swarm season, that is – late April/Early June in Mid TN – when the bees want to reproduce.  It can be done earlier and later, but it’s a lot more difficult.

The Basic Principle of Honey Bee Queen Rearing

Any queenless hive of honey bees will try to make a new queen if it has the resources to do so.  The required resources being  1)  larva of an appropriate age 2)  food 3)  A sufficient number of worker bees 4)  Drones – male bees – that the new queen can mate with.  Most of the time such a hive  will be successful in requeening itself.   The reason this is possible is that the only difference between a worker bee and a queen bee is the amount and type of food that they eat during the first few days after hatching from an egg.

So  if you want to raise a new queen, all you really have to do is create a hive without a queen  which has eggs or very young larva, and let the bees do the rest.    This is called a split and it  is a fine way to increase the number of hives that you have.  And it’s exactly what I (mostly) did to go from 1 to 10 hives during my first 2 years.

A frame of foundationless brood with "emergency" queen cells on it. Ever heard that foundationless brood always has lots of drone brood on it? Not when it's drawn in a queen-right mating nuc.

The problem with making a split is that even though your queenless hive will probably make several queen cells only one of them will get a chance to fly out and mate – because the first one to emerge will kill the rest. And there is a significant chance that one won’t make it home either – many get eaten by predators, lost, or caught in bad weather.  So after committing a strong queenless hive to the project for about a month at best you only get one queen – and there’s a fair chance that you won’t even get one.

Also high quality queens must be fully fed, and immaculately cared for from the time they hatch from the egg – any queenless hive will do what they can with what they have, but you want your queens to be raised under the very best of conditions.  And that takes a lot of well fed nurse bees – hundreds per each queen.

Queen Rearing – is a process whereby   one strong queenless hive  produces many well fed/well grown queen cells at the same time, and then before they emerge and kill one another  they are each given their own  “mating nucleus” hive to emerge into  and head up until they are fully mature.  Worker cells lay horizontally in the hive – queen cells hang down vertically in the hive.  When nurse bees encounter larva in cells that hang down they tend to treat them as queen cells.  This concept is central to most queen rearing methods.

Using such a process one “Mother Queen” with desirable properties can produce many – in some cases thousands – of high quality daughter queens.  Or you can use a similar system to produce a dozen or so good queens for your own use.  At $20-$40 each plus shipping for “store bought” queens  you don’t need to produce very many for it to make sense.  I would like to point out though, that after rearing queens myself a few times I understand why they are so expensive.  There is nothing all that hard about it, but there are several steps, and some of them absolutely must be done on a specific schedule.

A few Queen Rearing terms you should know:

Grafting – moving very young worker larva into artificial cell cups.  There are some graftless ways of producing queens    but you will probably want to learn to graft sooner or later, and the thing is – it’s way easier than you probably think. It just takes practice. Grafting is pretty much the only way the pros use to produce large numbers of queens.

Cell Starter – An extremely populous – usually queenless – hive that will begin the process of turning worker larva into queen larva.

Cell Finisher – After about 24 hours in the cell starter the cells are move into a finisher – Another populous (usually queenright) hive which will  finish feeding/building the queen cells.

Starter/Finisher – One hive that combines the functions of the starter and finisher.  The Joseph Clemens System uses a starter/finisher as does the Cloake system.

Mating Nuc – 10 days after grafting, the cells are removed from the finisher hive and each is put into their own queenless hives – mating nucs -  which they will emerge into, and fly out from to mate.  After mating the new queen will stay in the mating nuc at least until she is laying eggs  and fully mature – 3 weeks more or less.

The Joseph Clemens Starter/Finisher System

The system that I’ve been using is what  I call the Joseph Clemens System – because that is where I heard about it from, and because Joseph Clemens has proven that it works by producing very large, high quality cells and queens using this system.  I have found  that it is very well suited for me to produce a fair number of queens while learning skills that can be scaled up to higher production later if desired.  It’s fun, affordable, and you can use it even if you only have a few hives.

You can use this system over and over throughout the season without having to repopulate the starter/finisher hives, and you can use it just about any time that you want without having to do a lot of prep work  – once you get it going .  This system also avoids the problem of having to manage a hive that is on the verge of swarming by being Queenless  – no matter how strong it is, a hive won’t swarm without a queen.  When I first read about it, I thought that it sounded like such a hive would develop  laying workers or some other problem because of being queenless for an indefinate time.  But, because you give it fresh brood about once a week none of those problems crop up – it just gets really strong and stays that way all season long.

This is not a system that is usually used by bulk queen producers.  High volume producers usually use a five gallon bucket full of  bees in a specialized swarm box as a cell starter, and another big strong queenright hive that is on the verge of swarming as a finisher – to produce hundreds of cells at a time.   Those commercial starters and finishers have to be rebuilt very often.  And then once they’ve produced all those cells they have to put them into an equally large number of mating nucs.   The Joseph Clemens method uses a queenless five frame nucleus with 4 medium frames of bees and a cell bar as a combined Starter/Finisher and produces 10-20 cells (more or less) at a time – and it can be used all season without having to be rebuilt.  As you can imagine this is much more manageable for hobbyists than the way the commercial guys do it.

But, I’ve seen it written that you can’t really produce good cells in such a setup.  I present exhibit A:

Joseph Clemons "nice" regular sized cells produced with this method.

One of my best batch of cells using this method. I'm still learning, but next year these will be my "regular" sized cells instead of just the best ones. I hope.

A nice queen - just starting to lay - that I produced this past summer.

As previously mentioned the heart of this system is a  five frame nucleus hive (nuc) – which you probably already have.  Joseph uses a deep hive body with medium frames, and I’ve been using a medium hive body with a slatted rack under it – but they probably amount to about the same thing.   Both of us protect the entrance with a piece of queen excluder to keep rogue queens from taking over the hive.

This is the setup I started the season with - the top box houses a quart jar feeder. Before long I realized that the entrance through the slatted rack was too small for such a populous hive, and that the ventilation was not adequate.

So, I changed to this setup - from the bottom - Screened bottom board, queen excluder, 5 frame medium hive body. As you can see, this is an extremely populous hive. It's all screwed together so that it can be easily picked up and moved if desired. Once the bees went back in it got the same inner cover, feed shim, and tele cover as in the previous picture. BTW, such a populous hive isn't usually bothered much by robber bees, or Hive Beetles.

You can start raising queens any time that you have drones, but it will be much easier to get good results – and easier period – during the main spring nectar flow/swarm season.  In my area of middle Tennessee Swarm season started hot and heavy during the first week of April this past spring so counting back from that date I set up my starter/finisher hive about March 15 (if I remember correctly) and grafted for the first time around March 20.  The truth is, that the weather this April was very unsettled, and not the best for queen mating flights, but the early start allowed me to get a little practice in before the prime queen production season – the month of May through early June.   Think about that when you order a commercial queen for early spring delivery – what was the weather like when that queen was trying to mate?  Another reason to raise your own.

Setting up the Cell Builder Hive

The two outer frames are capped/emerging brood, the next two contain stores – honey and pollen, maybe some empty space for them to draw comb and  store incoming food.  The center position is where you will be putting your cell bar after you graft.

You want this hive to be very populous, so either shake in lots of nurse bees, or you can do what I did and set it up in a spot from which I just removed a strong full sized hive.  That way most of the foragers from the big hive that was there before all crowd into the new cell builder – but make sure it also has plenty of nurse bees too.  Don’t accidentally shake a queen in there along with the nurse bees.  After the initial setup the cell builder will stay strong – even get stronger – from the frames of brood that you swap in every week.

Once a week (more or less) when you are working your other hives  swap in a fresh frame of capped/emerging brood. The open brood on those frames along with the grafts and other open brood that you add to the cell builder keep it strong and stable.  When you swap in new brood, you also have to check for queen cells in the starter/finisher, and on any frames that you take out – you will find wild cells pretty much every time.  But  since it’s only a 5 frame hive, and it doesn’t have a queen you can shake the bees off, and thoroughly inspect every frame  in just a few minutes.  Usually there is no need to even look at every frame – 2 of them will be pollen/honey, and one will be the cell bar.  It’s pretty quick and easy maintenance, but it does have to be done at least once a week while the hive is being used.

How I (and you can ) Finally produce  Big Cells

I tried fruitlessly almost all of this year to produce big cells like others that I had seen on the internet. I packed my cell builder with bees which I fed copiously, I tried double grafting, priming with royal jelly, placing fewer grafts – but no matter how hard I tried my best cells were “OK” at best – until I found this tip by Ray Marler: 4 days before you graft put a frame of hatching eggs/young open larva in the cell builder.  That will insure that  your nurse bees  get into feeding mode by the time you add your grafts.  My experience is that  if I  skip this step I get much smaller cells.   Joseph Clemens produces nice big cells without this step, because he is continously using his cell builder – so the bees stay in feeding nurse bee mode – while I was only adding grafts to my cell builder every week or two.

When you swap in the cell bar with grafts on it there will almost certainly be queen cells started on the “primer”  frame of open brood that you will have to deal with – whatever you do don’t just put it back into a queenright hive or it is likely to be superceded by a queen from one of the cells.   At that time also check the other frames for queen cells. If you ever let one emerge it will ruin any cells that are currently in the hive – and you might have a hard time finding a virgin lose in such a crowded hive.

I feed my cell builder hive continously - 1 to 1 sugar syrup from an inverted quart jar, and under the jar lid...

...Pollen substitute. I just spoon it in through the hole, and cover it with the jar lid. This is 8% protein mega bee mix with enough syrup to make a paste that is thick enough to not fall through the frames. The bees love it.

Grafting

Once you have your cell builder set up, fed, and it has had a frame of eggs and open brood in the center for 4 days it is time to prepare your grafts.  I use a Stainless Grafting Needle, but the Chinese tools are probably more popular among hobbyists.  Really experienced hands can do it with a paper clip or toothpick – some favor a very small artists paint brush – there are lots of options available.

Home made cell bar frame with JZBZs cells installed - ready for grafts.

Required Grafting Supplies

• Some kind of grafting tool
• Cell bar frame
• Cups to graft into

The experienced pros are very skilled and fast, and can get the job done with nothing more.

Optional Grafting supplies

• Magnification – I have used dime store reading glasses, and a lighted desk magnifier (works pretty good but requires power) – but I very much favor a lighted Donegan optics Optivisor (jewlers visor) in 2.5 x power – it makes a huge difference for me (about $50 from Amazon)
• Damp paper towels or eqivalent to cover keep your grafts covered so they don’t dry out
• Some liquid to “prime” (moisten) the cell cups with – water, sugar water, honey water, royal jelly, yogurt (did not work well for me), etc
• Hypodermic needle to apply the priming liquid
• Damp bath towel to wrap the frame of larva that you are using
• Auxiliary lighting (my lighted jewelers visor)
• Work surface
• Spring clamp to keep your cell bar from falling over
• Water to drink
• All of these are optional, but they also all improve my chances of success, and I keep them all together in a an old brief case that I use as a grafting kit.

Also of course you will need a frame of brood with appropriately young larva to graft from.

As you can see in this great photo by Jeff LaSorsa You will most easily find the best larva for grafting by looking at the ones between unhatched eggs and larva that are too old.

The larva that you want to graft are the ones that look like milky smudges of royal jelly – as young as possible after they have hatched.  If you look really closely you can see them in there – not much bigger than an egg, but larva have segments.  You shouldn’t graft unhatched eggs, but other than that they can’t be too young – if you see jelly it has hatched, the bees don’t feed eggs.

Unless your eyesight is really excellent you can probably benefit from some supplemental light and magnification.  At least choose a place to work that has good light. That is the tip of my grafting tool BTW.

Grafting Tips

• If it isn’t warm – shirt sleeves weather – you need a place to graft where it is.  Inside your car for example – if nowhere else is handy.
  
• Before you start open up the space for the cell bar in your cell builder hive by removing the frame of open brood from the center – leaving all the bees in the hive – so that you can get your grafts in there as quickly as possible.
• While you have the cell builder open check for any wild queen cells – they need to be removed, and you can harvest the royal jelly from them to prime your cell cups if you want.
• You want your grafts to be pretty much the only open brood in the hive.
• It is easier to take grafts off of black plastic foundation – the plastic is stronger and you won’t accidentally punch holes in it with your tool, and the black color makes it easier to see the larva.  Much easier.  Second best is old dark colored brood comb.
• In the spring you can take a partially drawn frame from a honey super and put it in the middle of the brood chamber and in about 5-7 days it will be full of perfect larva for grafting.
• Once you find the frame you want to graft from, and get all of the bees off of it keep it wrapped in a warm, damp bath towel except for the area you are grafting from.
• Don’t shake your frame of larva too vigorously – brush the bees off of it.
• Don’t try to do too many grafts the first time 8-12 maybe.  You aren’t going to be very fast, and also fewer grafts will get better attention from the bees. And let’s be honest – you probably aren’t going to produce prize winning queens on the very first try.  Soon maybe, if you stick with it.
• Try to get as much royal jelly as possible along with the larva.
• When you pick up a larva on your grafting tool it is best if it is kind of hanging off of the tip – that way you can more easily deposit it in the cell cup.
• If you flip one, have to take several tries at it, or for any reason think it didn’t go well – abandon that one and try again.
• It sometimes helps if you break out the side of the cell you are grafting from (right side if you are right handed) so that you have more room to manipulate your tool – the bees will repair it.
• The idea is to scoop up the puddle of royal jelly with the larva in it then deposit it into the cell cup – with little or no direct contact to the actual larva.
• It is easier to pick up larva that have a good bit of royal jelly – so feed the mother Queen’s hive unless there is a good flow on.
• It makes it much easier to get the larva off into the cell cup if it is primed with the tiniest possible drop of priming liquid – royal jelly works best, but plain water is pretty close.
• As soon as you deposit a graft into a cup, cover it with your damp towel to keep it from drying out.
• As soon as you are finished get the grafts  into the cell builder, and the brood frame back where it came from.
• JZBZs  very popular plastic grafting cups can be used right out of the bag – many other brands  recommend that you put theirs in a hive for a day to be cleaned and polished.

In 24 hours the ones that “take” will look like this:

24 hour old queen cells in JZBZs wide based cell cups - notice the royal jelly in the bottom of the cells.

It wouldn’t be at all surprising if you have 60% or more success on the first try, but if you don’t get at least 3-4  you might want to go ahead and try again immediately – no need to start over with a frame of brood in the cell builder, just take the first set out and regraft into new cell cups.  It isn’t unusual for the nurse bees to start a cell and then clean it back out in a few days if it has anything at all wrong with it, or if the hive is under stress.  Don’t be disappointed if your take is poor on the first try – you will improve quickly if you keep at it.

2 day old grafts

3 day old grafts

After the cells are capped on day 5 the larva starts consuming the stored royal jelly. Hopefully she won't run out until she is finished developing - that is why the cell builders need to have lots of well fed nurse bees. These are some of my "OK" cells that I mentioned.

Once the cells are capped it will help to prevent the bees from building burr comb all over them if you take out a frame of food and give them a frame of foundation – or even better barely drawn foundation – to build wax on.  You can also curtail feeding as long as there is a flow on.

After  the cells are capped the developing queens are very fragile and you need to leave them alone until you remove them on the 10th day after grafting to move them into mating nucs.

An 8 frame medium hive body converted into 2 four frame mating nucs - The bottom is flat, and this design uses a standard telescoping cover as a lid. It works fine, but the bee space on the bottom isn't correct, which causes several issues. Also this particular design is more complicated to make than it needs to be.

Mating Nucs

Ten days after you graft you have to move your queen cells into (already prepared) queenless mating nucs – as previously mentioned if they are still all together when they start emerging then the first one out will kill all the rest of them.  This is one of those steps which you must do on schedule – I don’t even recommend that you wait too late on the tenth day to do it – I lost a batch like that during hot weather.   Warm temperatures can accelerate the maturation process a bit.

Mating nucs are the most resource expensive part of queen rearing.  If you have 2 good 20 frame hives to work with  you could conceivably produce hundreds of good queen cells, but it would take  everything you have to make up 20 full frame mating nucs using 2 frames each - if you had a perfect balance of brood and food frames.  You probably would not want to do that.   That’s another reason why there is no need to do 40 grafts on your first try – growing into it as you learn helps to keep it more manageable anyway.

3 frame mating nucs in the apiary - I am feeding them using inverted mason jars through holes in the covers - the coffee cans keep the sun from heating up the syrup and forcing it out into the hives. I like this stand alone design - it's simple to make, is economical of materials and it works quite well. I've decided that I personally favor similar stand alone 4 frame nucs though. My current version is made so that 2 of them can winter together on top of a strong hive.

Baby nucs / Mini nucs – Some queen producers use tiny little nucleus hives that they can start with only a cup full of nurse bees – but that seems to me to be  a more advanced method, and I have never tried it yet.  I have only used mating nucs that use full sized medium frames.   All of my frames are mediums BTW, which is very convenient when making up mating nucs.

Full sized Hives as Mating Nucs – You really don’t have to have special nucleus hives to use as mating nucs – full sized hive setups will work fine – that is what I did the first time.  If you are raising queens to increase your apiary that may the best way to do it – that way you never have to move the queens once they are mated.  However, I believe that nucleus hives do better in general when they are a little bit crowded in smaller boxes – it seems to me that they can defend and control the environment better.   Nonetheless, for apiary expansion full sized setups work fine, and won’t require much extra management at all once they are queen right.

Specialized full frame Mating Nucs – If you are interested in queen rearing for more than just expanding your own hive count you will probably want to use some kind of specialized mating nucs – full frame mating nuc boxes  can be made to contain from 1-5 frames.  There are advantages and disadvantages to any of them. 

The trade offs between small nucs and big ones: Smaller nucs take fewer resources to start, and when it comes time to find the new queen it is an easier task  with fewer/smaller  frames to look at – A bigger deal than you might think.  But the bigger the nuc is the more self sufficient and easy to manage it will be.  During the main flow any  nuc will grow and fill up – especially once they have a laying queen – and you will have to remove bees and  resources  from them to keep them from swarming.

During the main flow full frame mating nucs produce valuable resources – drawn comb, brood, stores, bees – that can be used anywhere in your operation. Last spring I was using mostly 4 frame nucs, and I could take a frame of bees and brood from each of them about once a week – resources that I used to start new mating nucs.  Later in the season I tried 3, 4, and 5 frame  nucs, and at this time I think I prefer 4 framers as being a good balance between being big enough to be self sufficient, and yet small enough to be practical as mating nucs.  When a 4 frame nuc gets too strong and needs a frame or two removed the part that is left is still  a pretty strong little hive – more so than when you steal a frame or two from a 3 framer – just my experience.   Nonetheless, I’ll reuse all of them next year – they all work.

Setting Up Mating Nucs – Whatever size box you use you can set up good full frame mating nucs with just two frames of resources – one frame of brood, and one frame of food – and of course the bees that are clinging to them.  You should always fill the remaining space with something – frames of empty foundation, foundationless frames, drawn comb, whatever – if you leave it empty, before you know it the bees will build wild comb from the inside of the cover – making a wasteful mess.  Also a frame of foundation right next to the tiny colony of bees will shelter them a bit and make it easier for them to control the temperature around their nest area.

There is a need to be enough bees to cover and take care of the brood – if in doubt shake in some more.  Keep in mind that any foragers will return to the hive that they came from – so shake bees off of brood frames in the middle of the day (when most of the foragers are out)  if possible so as to get as many nurse bees as possible.   There is no need to close up the nucs or move them to a remote location – they will start foraging in a few days.  The frames and bees can come from multiple hives.  Needless to say, you need to be sure to not accidentally put a queen in one – if you do she will probably be killed by the virgin which emerges from the cell - Newly emerged virgins are queen killing machines.

Prepare mating nucs the day before you will be installing cells.

On the next round all you have to do to prepare these same nucs for another cell  is to remove the resident queen from the mating nuc the day before or at the time you give the hive a new cell – unless it fails to make a laying queen, but I’ll get to that later.

A ripe queen cell installed in a mating nuc - all you have to do is push the cell into the comb like this - preferrably near brood. That's the kind of cell we all want to produce.

On the tenth day after making grafts – Placing the Queen cells is almost anticlimactic – just stick the cells to the brood frames as in the picture above.  If you are not using plastic cell cups,  just use your finger to make a depressed spot on the comb and gently stick the cell to it.  The cell needs to be near brood if at all possible and in the center of the nest area.   At all points handle the cells as carefully as possible.   Close up the mating nuc and wait for nature to take it’s course.  The queen will emerge within a day or two, and after a few days of hanging out in the hive – hardening up and being cared for by the resident house bees – she will fly out to mate.  You may be able to detect eggs in 10-12 days,  but unless you have a rather good eye for eggs it is probably best to wait about 3 weeks after placing the cell – at which time you should be able to easily see large open brood – or even capped brood.  Waiting a bit longer also gives the queen more time to fully developed without being pestered.  Some experts say that this is very important,  some don’t.  It certainly makes it much easier to make the call as to if you have a laying queen or not.  However after 3 weeks, any nucs that are still queenless, will need immediate intervention – fresh brood, and a new cell – or they will soon decline and/or develop laying worker.

Mating Nuc Management – If it is during the main flow, and you make up your nucs on the day before installing a cell as I have outlined – with a good frame of brood, and a good frame of food, and plenty of bees – the hive will get stronger over the next couple of weeks as the brood emerges.  If it is successful in making a queen, then it will develop quite nicely with little intervention.  Since it started with a food reserve, and forage is plentiful during the flow, you shouldn’t need to feed it at all.  Also during the spring flow there shouldn’t be much if any issues of robbing, hive beetles, or wax moths.  It’s really pretty easy to take care of your mating nucs under such conditions.  Mostly you will just need to keep an eye on them to keep them from getting so strong that they swarm – as mentioned before you may need to remove brood frames with bees on them almost once a week during the peak season.  And of course you will have to remove the resident queen before you can put another cell in it.

However, if a nuc doesn’t make a queen for any reason it can start to go downhill quite quickly without intervention.  You need to inspect all mating nucs about once a week to make sure they aren’t raising their own queen cells (unless you want them to) and to assess their condition.  Any that are queenless need to either get a new cell or be combined back with a queenright hive.  Before a queenless nuc gets a new cell it is probably best to give it a new frame of brood as well – you may not need to give it any more bees, because it should already have a workforce.

Actually, the location will have a workforce.  If you move a hive – any hive – to a new location, the foragers will all go back to the old spot.  If there isn’t a hive there they will still go to that spot and hang around in complete confusion for a few days.  And then they will beg into a near by hive.  You can use this behavior to your advantage at times by swapping locations of strong and weak hives to equalize the populations.

It doesn’t take very much time or work to go through and care for  a 3 or 4 frame mating nuc.   But when you do it every week, and multiply it by 10 mating nucs (or 20, or 30) it may be a bigger job than you think.  Another reason to start small.

Summer Queen Rearing – Everything gets harder after the spring flow ends.   After the flow  you have to feed because forage is scarce, the stronger hives rob the mating nucs, even the strong mating nucs rob the weak ones -  heat, wax moths,  and hive beetles become  issues – it’s also harder to get your cell builder to perform.  All of those things can be managed of course.  The point is, if you want to learn to raise queens you should plan to do it when it’s easier (and better) whether or not you plan to continue during the hard times of high summer.

Until now I haven’t mentioned genetics, drones, or breeding selection.  Those are important aspects of queen rearing of course, and well before you get to the point of producing hundreds of queens per year you will of course need to learn a thing or two about those matters.  However if you are only learning or dabbling, or just want to raise a few good queens for yourself – you surely will take grafts from what you believe to be a worthy queen, and chances are there will be enough drones available during the Spring season to properly mate a dozen or so queens at a time.  But since each queen needs to mate with 12 – 20 drones a little math shows that it might become an issue sooner than you think.   So read.

The Numbers

Other than my very first try I have always had at least 50% success rate at grafting and getting them built into cells.  Before too many times I started averaging about 80%.  Usually there are at least a few of those that are smaller and really shouldn’t be used – so call it 60% success rate at grafting.  You might do better.

Once I place cells in mating nucs about %50 of them end up becoming laying queens – I know that most of them emerge by the condition of the empty cells, but from the beginning of the season all the way through August it was consistently about 50%.  I’m not very happy with that, but there it is. I hope to do better in the future.  Nonetheless If I wanted to produce 20 queens I would plan to plant cells in 40 mating nucs.

• A honey bee egg hatches about 3 days after being laid.
• A larva is fit for grafting and  making a queen for only about 36 hours – younger is better.
• A cell is capped on about the 5th day after grafting.
• Between capping and emerging the developing queen is extremely delicate at times and the cell shouldn’t be handled except when necessary – and carefully then.  Although at 10 days the cell is relatively robust.
• A virgin queen will emerge from the cell about 13 days after grafting.  Warm weather speeds this up.
• By as soon as 4 days after emerging from the cell a virgin queen will be ready to mate.
• She will mate with as many as 25-30 (Supposedly an average of 15 or so) drones over the course of several days.
• Once mated she may start laying eggs in 3-4 days.
• A Queen will continue to develop and mature for several weeks, and it is generally suggested that for best results she not be banked or caged for about 3 weeks after planting the cell in the mating nuc.

Other Resources

Moving from OK Queens to Great Queens – Discussion on Beesource Queen rearing forum.

Graftless Methods of Queen Rearing – If you have really bad eyesight or unsteady hands, any of these methods can produce high quality queens.

• Oldtimer’s – queen rearing without grafting,
• The Cell Punch method
• Michael Bush’s A Few Good Queens Method – Michael Bush also has many public domain books about bee keeping and queen rearing on his website, and has also authored his own book “The Practical Bee Keeper“.

This is from the notes I took at an excellent session at the Heartland Apiary Society gathering in Cookeville, TN July 8-10, 2010.  I’ve tried to accurately record the instructions that were given, but it is quite possible that I’ve gotten something wrong.  Caveat Emptor and all that.

Everyone won’t agree with all of this – that is a given among bee keepers – but I’ve tried not to interject my opinion at all.

To make a good honey crop requires:

1) A large population of foraging bees during the honey flow.

2) That they not swarm.

It is assumed that the bees are healthy and disease free, and have a manageable load of mites or other parasites.

Requeen within the next 6 weeks (EI between July 10 and August 21 more or less) if your existing queen has already performed through one or more intensive brood production periods.   It is important that your queen is performing at her peak potential during the fall build up.  Without a strong hive population going into winter it will be impossible to build up sufficiently to exploit the short nectar flow that is available in the south.

Never let any hives fall below less than 15 pounds of honey available in the hive – ever.  Malnutritioned bees will not be very productive, and perceived food insecurity will cause the queen to slow or stop egg production.

Note: Dates given are rules of thumb based on mid-south weather, but even in the mid south they are only guidelines and judgment should be exercised by the bee keeper – that’s really the trick isn’t it?

To prevent swarming

Note to 2nd year bee keepers with over wintered hives from your first season – If your hives are strong and  if you don’t have empty drawn comb to give your bees in the spring and as the honey flow begins it may be almost impossible to prevent your hives from swarming unless you split out the queen before swarm prep starts at the end of March or beginning of April.  Most effective swarm prevention requires drawn comb – bare foundation will not work.

Feb 15 – Inspect hives.

March 10 – Population build up should be apparent. At this time (before bees have worked all the way to the top of the hive) reverse hive bodies – but only if at least 4-5 days of decent weather is predicted.

April 1 – Arrange hives so that all brood is in the top brood box except for one frame of capped brood plus one frame of mixed brood in the bottom brood box – remainder of frames in the bottom box to be empty drawn comb.  This manipulation is to make room for queen to lay.

Reverse hive bodies about every ten days – three times by April 25.

April 11 – if weather permits do a thorough inspection and remove any queen cells – As long as fresh eggs are found indicating a queen which is laying. Continue to inspect and remove swarm cells every 10 days for the duration of swarm season – about May 15.  A frame by frame inspection of every hive is usually not practical – examine the bottoms of brood chambers for swarm cells and then do frame by frame inspections on hives that have cells or other evidence of swarming.

April 20 – add honey super whether they need it or not.

April 25 –main brood chamber should be on the bottom.

Stop inspecting for swarm cells about May 15.

Alternative Swarm prevention method If you are using all medium equipment – April 1 – Arrange hives so that all brood is in the top brood box except for one frame of capped brood plus one frame of mixed brood in the bottom brood box – remainder of frames in the bottom box to be empty drawn comb a box of mostly empty comb between the two brood chambers and an excluder over the bottom chamber (with the queen in it).  This manipulation is to make room for queen to lay.  The top brood chamber will almost always develop queen cells which must be removed 10 days later.  The bottom brood chamber shouldn’t need checking for 21 days after this manipulation.  The brood in the top chambers will hatch and make room for nectar storage – when one box is fully capped honey it can be placed directly over the bottom brood chamber (still containing the queen) and the excluder can be remove until June 15.  The capped honey will keep the queen in the lower brood chamber, but will not impede the movement of workers like a queen excluder does.  If you are apprehensive about having only one medium brood chamber then use 2 below the excluder.

Don’t use a queen excluder until June 15.

June 15 – add a queen excluder wherever you want it regardless of presence of brood above the excluder – make sure that the queen is below the excluder.

July 6 – any brood above excluder will have emerged and cells will be filled with honey – honey may be harvested at this time.

Requeen  within the next 6 weeks.

Queen Bees – The heart and soul of a honey bee colony is the Queen.  Every hive has just one (with few exceptions) and if she is healthy, good natured, and productive she will pass those traits on to all of her daughters – the worker bees – and all will be good.

A bee keeper needs new queens to replace failing older queens, and to establish new hives and grow their operations.  If a hive becomes queenless for very long it’s production and health will suffer, and eventually the colony will die.  Hives with old queens are more likely to “swarm” – an event where the hive splits itself and half of the bees flying off to make honey for their selves instead of for the bee keeper. So replacing old queens with new ones every year is also a way of preventing swarms.

Queen Rearing – Most bee keepers order new queens by mail (when they are available) for about $20 each plus shipping.  Others raise (or allow the bees to raise) their own queens one at a time like nature does.  These videos are of what is called queen “rearing” – producing viable queens in batches.

At a value of $20.00 each the ability to rear even small batches of queens could make a big difference in the economics of a small apiary. Being able to have queens when you need them instead of having to wait for one to come through the mail, and having some control over genetics are also factors in favor of learning this craft.

Wax cell cups for raising queens

In the first video very young (probably one day old or less) worker larva are being removed from a frame of brood comb and placed into wax cups using a wire grafting tool.  BTW, all workers are female.  The larva are very small – about the size of a comma.  Wax cups roughly the size of a small thimble  are either manufactured or are home made by dipping a wet wooden peg into liquid wax.

1) Grafting larva into cups

In the next video, the grafted queen cups which have been mounted with hot wax onto cork shaped pegs that fit into a special frame are being placed into a “cell starter” hive.  A cell starter is a regular hive with the queen removed that has a very high population density of bees – especially young “nurse” bees – and plenty of food stores – honey, and pollen.  Probably the bee keeper removed hive body boxes from the  starter hive to crowd the bees together.  The high density of nurse bees and food will assure that the grafted larva will be fed plenty of “royal jelly” which is produced by the nurse bees.  The queenless state of the hive will motivate the workers to raise new queens just like they would in nature if something happened to the old queen.

Worker bees are raised in comb cells just like honey comb which are horizontally oriented while queens are raised in cells that hang down vertically.  Apiarists have learned that some of the  worker larva that are the right age placed into a queenless hive  in cells that are vertically oriented like queen cells, will be raised as queens – which is what all of this manipulation is about.  The only differences that make a worker larva become a queen is the diet of royal jelly that they are fed as larva and the shape of the cell that they grow in.  In a few days the cells can be removed from the cell starter hive, and either another batch started, or the queen can be replaced, and the starter hive can be returned to work making honey.

2)Installing grafted queen cups into a cell starter hive

In the next video the bee keeper is collecting nurse bees that he will use to make up “mating nucs”  for the newly hatched queens.  Nurse bees have never been out of their home hive, and won’t try to fly back to it once the Nucleus hives are set up.  Also the nurse bees – after being without a queen and her pheromones for a few hours – will be very accepting of a new queen.   If a queen is introduced into a hive that already has a queen she will usually be killed.  The young nurse bees will also be the right age to produce wax comb in the empty mating nuc.

If you carry a box full of bees away from it’s colony all of the mature field bees will quickly return to the home hive, but the nurse bees will not readily abandon brood comb which contains baby bees.  So the bee keeper has  separated brood comb covered with nurse bees a short distance from their hive(s) and allowed the field bees to leave.  Once he is finished with this operation I imagine the brood will be returned to it’s home.  I think he is spraying them with sugar or honey water to keep them calm.

3) Collecting Nurse Bees for Mating Nucs

In the next video the nurse bees are being measured into the empty mating nucleus hives.  It looks to me like he is measuring about a cup of bees into each one – 1700 bees more or less.

4) Ladling nurse bees into mating nucs

In the next video the newly hatched virgin queens are being marked for identification to prepare them for going into the mating nucleus hives. Queens can be labeled with tiny numbered stickers – or simply with a dot of color which indicates the year of her birth.  Either way she will be marked for life, and a marked queen is a lot easier to find in a hive full of bees.

Notice at the beginning of the video the queen cells have been placed into small cages.  This was done off video after the queen cells were capped (sealed) by the nurse bees, and before the adult queens emerged from the capped cells.  If they weren’t confined in cages the first queen to emerge would kill all of her sisters before they came out of their cells.

After the queen cells were caged they might have been put into an artificial incubator, or most likely into a “cell finisher” hive which is just a strong normal “queenright” (with queen) hive that keeps the capped cells at the correct temperature and humidity until they hatch.

You will notice that queen bees are not inclined to sting or fly.

5) Marking Virgin Queens

In the next video the marked queens are being dipped into honey water to mask their scent and help the nurse bees to accept her before being  inserted into the prepared mating nucleus hives.

After installing the queen the beekeeper is closing the entrance, and making an entry in his voice memo recorder which I’m sure will be later transcribed into a written record.  Record keeping is an important part of this kind of operation.

The small size of the mating nucs make it possible for such a small number of bees to control the temperature, protect it from invaders, and become a full fledged although small colony.  The sides of these particular nucs are glass which will make it very easy to monitor the progress of the queens.  The top section of the nuc has a space for food (probably sugar candy) so that the little family of bees can get its house in order without worrying about gathering food for a few days.

Any small hive can be used as a mating nucleus, or even a full sized hive, but the nucs in these videos look like they would be perfect for this kind of operation – and would be especially handy if they were to be taken to a remote location for mating.

6) Installing Queens into Mating Nucs

Once the queenright nucs are placed into the apiary and the entrances opened the workers will get busy setting up house, and within a few days the queen will fly out for her mating flight.

On her mating flight the new queen may fly several miles away and hopefully will mate with several strong healthy male “drone” bees, and then return to her little colony.  She will only do this one time in her life, and her body will retain the sperm to fertilize all of the female eggs that she ever lays. Drone eggs are not fertilized oddly enough.

If the queen doesn’t return – she could be eaten by a bird, hornet or other predator, or she could be killed by sudden bad weather – the hive is basically doomed.

The queens that do return will soon start laying eggs, and soon the little colony will outgrow the mating nucs.  The successful queens can easily be evaluated by comparing how much brood they produce, and the best ones will be either sold (for about $20 each in the United States) or used within the apiary for replacing old queens or establishing new hives.

In the next video the worker bees from the nucleus hives seem to be being combined along with one queen to form an artificial swarm for the establishment of a new hive.  A package of honey bees that you can mail order is exactly like this artificial swarm.

7) Reuniting bees from used mating nucs into an artificial swarm

The bee keeper in these videos is obviously extremely experienced and competent, and is demonstrating his own tried and true method for queen rearing. The fact that he is speaking German (I think) really doesn’t matter, because as they say – a picture is worth a thousand words.  If anyone who understands would like to translate a bit in the comments I would very much appreciate it.

BTW, I certainly do not intend to imply that I’m an expert on queen rearing – I’ve never done it yet.  However I intend to give it a try once I build my apiary to the point where I have enough resources – probably next year which will be my third keeping bees.  I am posting this because;  Reader response to the other articles that I’ve done on beekeeping has been quite positive so I think quite a few people find it interesting.   And, producing an article like this  helps me to learn.

I know that it’s long, but I hope you liked it.

I’ve really enjoyed my first summer keeping bees – Working with, observing, and learning about the bees has been very interesting and enjoyable.  Before I started I read a lot about the subject, but inevitably experience teaches things that I didn’t pick up on during months of study.

You have to feed bees -  And it is more expensive than you would think – ideally bees feed their selves, but if you are trying to increase the population of your apiary you will probably have to feed sometimes – BTW most hobby bee keepers feed their bees syrup made out of plain old granulated sugar.  I haven’t kept up with it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve bought $50 (or more) worth of sugar to feed my 1 1/2 hives of bees this year.

When I feed my bees syrup I use a quart jar with a few small holes in the lid.

Bees make honey of course, but they also eat honey. So if you harvest too much, or if it just isn’t a good year for honey production you might have to feed your bees – even after they are well established.  But when you are first starting out and concentrating on growing more bees rather than producing honey it’s almost a sure thing that you will have to feed.  Bee keepers have a saying – You can grow bees or you can grow honey, but not both.  Don’t plan on producing a lot of honey for a year or two.

My mail order "package" of bees.

I started bee keeping by ordering a “package” of bees by U.S. Mail.  Despite placing my order in January I didn’t get my bees until May 10 – a whole month into the TN honey gathering season.  Also being my first year I didn’t have any drawn comb so my bees had only an empty box for a home and had to start out building wax comb instead of raising baby bees and gathering honey.  If one could start with a “nuc” – a small, but complete hive – earlier in the season the hive would get a much better start, and you might not have to feed them much – if at all.

Getting stung is pretty rare – I’ve only been stung 2-3 times, and once was because I put my hand down on a bee.  I know that it varies, but my Italian bees are very mild mannered so far.  Something that I didn’t really know before is that even when you open a hive and take it apart to inspect – almost all of the bees just keep on going about their business.  Unless you really get them upset they don’t all fly out and mob you – that never happened to me.  Very few of them ever try to sting you, and they don’t search for a gap to crawl into your clothes to get at you.  I did several full inspections while wearing regular clothes along with a veil and gloves – without getting stung.  Some bees aren’t so mild mannered, but my commercially raised Italians are.

You don’t really need a lot of equipment – Like any hobby you could spend a lot of money on a bunch of paraphernalia that you don’t need, but there is really no need for most of it.

What you do need:

Veil – A veil keeps bees away from your head and neck, but a mosquito head net from a hunting supply store will work for less than $5.

Gloves – many experienced bee keepers don’t wear gloves, but your hands are the most likely place to get stung and you will be more confident if you wear gloves at first.

Bee hive – A home for your bees.  But this does not have to be expensive.  A simple top bar hive can be built very cheaply, and will work just fine.

Bees

A plan – there was a time when honey bees could be kept successfully with very little human intervention, but because of the globalization of parasites and diseases that is no longer the case.  You need a plan for how you are going to deal with those issues – especially varroa mites.  You don’t have to know before you start, but by the end of your first summer you will, or it is likely that you will  lose your bees within a year or so.  Read all you can.

What you don’t need:

Honey extraction equipment – processing a lot of honey probably won’t be a problem for at least a year or two, and lots of bee keepers do what is called “crush and strain” which doesn’t require anything that you don’t already probably have.

Bee suit – Long pants and long sleeves to tuck everything into will work fine – along with some gloves and some kind of veil.  A roll of tape to secure cuffs and sleeves with will make you more confident, but won’t really be needed most of the time.

Hive tool – a putty knife,  screwdriver or pocket knife will work.  I still don’t have a hive tool.

Feeder – a quart jar works fine.

Frames and foundation – top bars with popsickle sticks will work great for your bees to build comb from.

Chemicals, supplements, medications – You might  have to treat for varroa mites, but I personally don’t buy the philosophy that you should arbitrarily dose your bees with antibiotics and other chemicals whether they need it or not.

If you are starting out with a package of gentle commercially produced bees like I did you could totally do without almost all of the protective garb.  A “real” bee suit will boost your confidence, but a $2.00 pair of work gloves, a $2.00 mosquito head net from any hunting supply store, a standard “hoodie” – sweat shirt, and long pants will work fine.  You don’t have to have a smoker – It is nice for getting the bees to move out of the way, and you will want one sooner or later, but in my opinion you don’t really need it until long after you have installed your package.  New packages are especially docile.

One hive isn’t enough – Starting with one hive is fine – two is probably better, but if you plan to keep bees from now on you will need more than one hive.  Fortunately, your colonies can reproduce and  turn one hive into many if you want to.  The problem with keeping only one or two hives is that if you lose one or two hives (not unusual) you are out of bees, but as long as you have one healthy colony left you can use it’s offspring to repopulate a failed hive.  So, multiple hives allow your operation to be more sustainable.

It is difficult to be “chemical free” your first year -  Most commercially produced bees don’t have very much resistance to parasites and diseases, and it is likely that you will choose to treat them, however there are effective alternatives to expensive synthetic chemical treatments.  There is also a lot of bad information about alternative treatments – so choose your plan of action carefully.

Bee hives come in all shapes and configurations and can be an attractive addition to a garden.

Honey bees don’t really care what kind of “house” they live in.  If you are building your own hive – woodenware as bee keepers call it – there are good reasons to use a standard configuration, but the bees won’t care if you don’t.  For centuries mud covered wicker skep hives like the ones in the top picture were used all over Europe.   Skeps are against the law in most parts of the U.S. however, because they are difficult to inspect.

Online forums are a great source of information – However, anyone can contribute to the conversation even if they don’t know what they are talking about.  I highly recommend that you check some of them out, but take everything with a grain of salt.  BeeMaster.com is one of my favorites, but as with any forum be prepared to filter.

This is a brand new (and nearly perfect) frame of honey bee brood. Click on the picture for a closer look.

Not brood as in introspective and depressed – brood is the term for pre-adult honey bees.  The queen lays an egg in a cell  (up to 2000 a day) and 3 days later it hatches out into a larva – on day 8 the workers put a wax cap on it – where it meta morphs like a caterpillar into a butterfly.  A few days later (depending on what caste the bee is destined for) an adult bee emerges.

I promise that this isn’t going to turn into a blog just about honey bees, but I think this is pretty cool and I thought some of you might be interested.  Click on either picture in this article and you’ll get a high resolution version that you can zoom in on – hold the ctrl button and hit the + key to zoom in.

Look closely now - in the uncapped cells you can see white larva curled up in all stages of development. The white capped cells at the top of the frame contain honey - I think. The tan cappings lower down contain baby bees. The cells that look empty actually have either eggs or larvae that are too small to see. Right in the center of the picture you can see a bee with her head stuck down into a cell - she's feeding a baby. Click on the picture for a much higher definition view.

Is that cool or what?

If you’ve been following my progress as a bee keeper you can see from these pictures that the bees have stopped building crooked comb and are now building 2 frames of comb like this about every 3 days.