Most of us who rear queens do it to provide serviceable queens for ourselves or others. We need queens to replace those that are failing or those that have [...]]]> A tweet from the Sheffield Honey Company reminded me that I should clarify the difference between queen rearing and queen breeding–and they are absolutely right.

Most of us who rear queens do it to provide serviceable queens for ourselves or others. We need queens to replace those that are failing or those that have died. We need queens to increase the number of colonies or to re-queen defensive hives. We are usually happy with a queen who produces a good brood pattern and gives rise to gentle workers. Sometimes–especially when they are scarce–nearly any queen will do.

But breeding queens is much more complex than simply rearing them. Breeders select stock based on genetic traits they want to enhance. Breeders usually have a specific goal in mind. They may want to increase honey production, decrease propolis collection, improve overwintering, or increase disease resistance. Recently, many queen breeders are looking for breeding stock that is resistant to the ravages of the Varroa mite.

In addition to selecting good queens, breeders must also select drones from colonies with specific traits. A “sperm donor” with desirable traits is just as important as the queen herself. Controlled crosses between selected queens and drones is beyond the capabilities of most beekeepers, so we rely on the breeders to do the laborious work of producing better bees.

The work breeders perform should not be underestimated. Breeders must select and maintain breeding stock, keep meticulous records, and record statistics about the offspring of the crosses. In addition, they must guard against inbreeding and always be on the lookout for negative as well as positive outcomes.

Most breeders use instrumental insemination to assure that the desired crosses occur. Instrumental insemination requires special equipment and training in addition to adequate time and financial resources. It is not easy.

So while most of us can raise a few queens as we need them, we must keep in mind that the unique lines with desirable characteristics that appear every so often are the result of dedicated breeders with special knowledge and resources, and most importantly, the wherewithal to succeed.

Rusty

Artificial insemination (or instrumental insemination): The manual [...]]]> Before you begin queen rearing, it helps to understand the lingo. Authors of queen-rearing instructions often use a variety of synonyms which make a confusing subject even more difficult. Below are some of the most common terms—and their synonyms—I found in recent publications.

Artificial insemination (or instrumental insemination): The manual transfer of sperm from drones to the genital organs of virgin queens.

Banking box (or holding box): A queenless colony used to hold caged queens until they can be used to re-queen different queenless colonies. With plenty of nurse bees, honey, and pollen, queens can be banked for several weeks.

Banking frame (or queen cage holder): A special frame designed to hold multiple queen cages in a banking box.

Breeder colony: A colony having desirable traits that a beekeeper will use as a source of eggs for queen breeding.

Breeder queen: The queen of the breeder colony that will lay the eggs used for raising new queens.

Cell (or peanut): To a beekeeper, a cell is the peanut-shaped structure that contains a developing queen. It is short for “queen cell” and should not be confused with the normal hexagonal cells found in wax combs.

Cell bar: A horizontal bar made to fit inside a regular frame. A frame may hold two to three cell bars, each designed to hold 15-20 cell bases. Once fitted with cell bars, the frame is called a cell holding frame or rearing frame.

Cell base: Cell bases are made from plastic or wood and are permanently mounted to cell bars. They are designed to hold cell cups.

Cell cup (or queen cup): This is the beginning of a queen cell. It is called a cell cup when it has a spherical shape—before the bees start to build it into a peanut shape. The term “cell cup” is also used to refer to plastic or wax artificial cups that are used for queen rearing.

Cell finisher (or finishing colony): A very populous queenright colony used to grow queen cells that have been started in a cell starter colony. The growing queen cells are separated from the queen with a queen excluder and kept in the cell finisher until they are capped.

Cell holding frame (or rearing frame): A regular frame fitted with cell bars for supporting cell bases.

Cell protector: A plastic or wire covering for a queen cell used to protect it from attack by other bees or the resident queen.

Cell starter (or starting colony or cell builder or swarm box): These are queenless colonies containing a large number of very young bees and brood. When the beekeeper is ready to “start” a new batch of queens, he removes the frames of brood and replaces them with frames of queen cups containing young larvae. The nurse bees will feed royal jelly to the larvae and thus get the queens “started.” The queen cups are removed after 24 hours.

Cloake board: A Cloake board is a piece of equipment that allows one populous hive to be used as both a cell starter and a cell finisher with minimum hive disturbance.

Grafting: The manual transfer of young larvae (12-24 hours old) from brood comb into cell cups.

Laying box (or comb box): In no-graft systems, a laying box is a plastic box in which the queen is confined with a series of plastic cell cups in which to lay eggs. Once the eggs are laid in the cell cups, the cups are removed to a cell starter and the queen is released.

Mating nuc: Each capped queen cell is put in a mating nuc, which is a small queenless colony. Here the queen will emerge and eventually take her mating flights.

Swarm cell: A swarm cell is a queen cell that was built in preparation for swarming. Multiple queen cells are usually found hanging from the bottoms or sides of combs in the heart of the brood nest. The old queen will leave with the swarm and a virgin queen from one of the swarm cells will become the new queen.

Virgin queen: an unmated queen. Virgin queens hatch 15-16 days from the time an egg was laid, or 11-12 days after grafting. A virgin makes her first mating flight about 7 days after hatching and will mate with about ten drones.

Rusty

Plastic cell cups and the back of a laying box.

Larvae used for grafting must be between 12 and 24 hours old. These [...]]]> Grafting is the process of transferring young larvae from worker cells into special cups used for raising queens. Larvae used for grafting are selected from the offspring of a “breeder” queen, that is, a queen whose genetics appeal to the beekeeper.

Larvae used for grafting must be between 12 and 24 hours old. These larvae are about the size of the egg they hatched from and are extremely delicate. They must be transferred using a special tool aptly called a “grafting tool.” Grafting tools range from simple implements, such as modified toothpicks or artist paint brushes, to specially manufactured tools with retractable springs and mini-scoops.

Grafting requires a lot of practice and a steady hand. Beekeepers often hone their skills on random larvae before their first attempts at queen rearing.

Nuc boxes—the structures that hold a nucleus colony—come in all shapes and sizes. Usually you see five-frame deep boxes, but they also come designed to hold medium frames. The [...]]]> The term “nuc” is short for nucleus colony. A nucleus colony is just a very small colony of a few thousand bees and a queen.

Nuc boxes—the structures that hold a nucleus colony—come in all shapes and sizes. Usually you see five-frame deep boxes, but they also come designed to hold medium frames. The width varies too. I have seen two-, four-, five-, and seven-frame nucs, both single story and double story. One of my favorite nucs is a standard-size deep box with three dividers that gives you four two-frame sections, each with its own entrance. Or you can remove one or more of the dividers to make bigger sections. It all depends on what you want.

Reasons for maintaining a nuc:

• If one of your hives goes queenless, you have another queen ready to go. If you wait for your colony to re-queen itself, the population will drop such that you won’t get any surplus honey for that year.

• You can re-queen at times of the year when queens are unavailable to purchase.

• You can use the bees in a nuc to boost populations of a weak hive. If you don’t want to re-queen, you can just transfer some of the frames from your nuc into the weak hive.

In addition, having an empty nuc box on hand is useful for catching swarms or removing extra bees from an overcrowded colony.

So how do you raise queens in a nuc? The simplest way is to take a frame of brood with a swarm cell from a populous hive and put it in a nuc. The frame should have lots of nurse bees covering the brood to keep them warm. Put a frame of honey or an internal feeder next to the brood. Fill any extra space with drawn comb or empty frames, then close the lid, add an entrance reducer, and let the bees do their thing.

This works fairly quickly. You can do the same thing without a swarm cell if there are plenty of eggs or very young larvae on the brood frame. This takes a long time, however, and after a week or two you may not have enough nurse bees left to raise a good queen.

Here’s an example from my own apiary on how I use a nuc.

• Last spring I had one hive that built up early and looked like it was ready to swarm. I didn’t want it to swarm, so I took out four frames of brood. Each frame had at least one swarm cell on the bottom and lots of nurse bees covering the brood.

• I put each frame in a separate two-frame nuc and gave each one a frame of honey reserved from the year before.

• After about four weeks, I checked the nucs and found three had produced laying queens. I combined the queenless one with one of the others, so now I had three nucs.

• After a few more weeks I transferred the two-frame nucs into five-frame equipment so the colony would continue to expand.

• I kept entrance reducers in the small colonies to protect them from robbing bees and yellow jackets.

• At the end of the fall, I transferred each five-frame nuc into ten-frame equipment.

• I stacked the three nucs, one atop the other. I put the strongest on the bottom, and put double-screen boards between each nuc so the warm air from the largest colony would help to keep the smaller ones warm.

• In December, I found a dead queen on the landing board of one of my regular hives. Using a piece of newspaper, I combined one of the queenright nucs with the queenless hive. This left me with two nucs.

• As of today, the hive to which I added the queen and the remaining two nucs are all thriving.

• We still have a number of weeks to go, but if the two remaining nucs are not needed before the first honey flow, I will set each of them up as a separate hive.

As you can see, having a nuc available gives you many management options that you wouldn’t normally have. You can think of a good nuc as an insurance policy against the loss of a queen.

Rusty

With little brood to feed, foragers concentrate on bringing home nectar [...]]]> A cut-down split is a special technique often used by comb honey producers. The purpose of a cut-down split is to maximize the number of foragers that are bringing in nectar by minimizing the amount of brood a colony has to care for.

With little brood to feed, foragers concentrate on bringing home nectar rather than pollen, and nurse bees without brood responsibility soon become foragers as well. The result is lots of honey in a short period of time.

Timing of a cut-down split it important. To be effective, the cut-down should be completed just before the start of a main nectar flow. No matter how well you organize the split, it won’t produce more honey if there is no nectar to collect.

To make a cut-down split:

• Find the queen.

• Place the queen and nearly all the open brood, honey, and pollen in a new hive. Make sure these frames are covered with nurse bees to care for the open brood.

• Leave the capped brood, one frame of eggs, and a small amount of honey and pollen in the old hive. At the same time reduce the number of brood boxes in this old hive by one and add empty honey supers. (So if there were three brood boxes, cut back to two. If there were two brood boxes, cut back to one. Add supers after cutting back the brood boxes.)

• Place the new hive in a different location so all of the foragers return to the old hive.

I know this is confusing, so try this:

After you are set up, this is what happens:

• The old hive won’t swarm because it doesn’t have a queen or young brood.  The colony will raise a new queen from the eggs, but by the time the colony is strong, swarm season will be mostly over.

o   This old hive has many more foragers and nurses than are needed to care for the one frame of eggs. In addition, all the capped brood will soon hatch and replace the nurse bees.

o   Because the hive is now crowded (due to the reduced number of brood boxes) many of the newly hatched nurse bees will move into the supers and start building comb—even in comb honey supers.

o   The old nurse bees will also become foragers, but since there is little brood to care for, pollen needs will be low. So the huge crop of foragers will collect nectar like crazy and make a lot of honey in a very short time—which they will store in the newly build comb.

• The new hive won’t swarm because there are no foragers. It will take several weeks to build up a foraging force.

Rusty

Let’s [...]]]> Last time I wrote about a simple way to split a hive to prevent swarming. It is quick and easy and results in two fairly equal hives. However, if your original hive is loaded with swarm cells you may be able to raise a few extra queens or start more than one hive.

Let’s say your soon-to-swarm hive has four frames with swarm cells on them. You can:

• Find the queen and either confine her or keep track of her.

• Take each frame with swarm cells on it and put it in its own nuc. These frames must also have lots of brood that is covered with nurse bees.

• To each nuc add a frame of honey or a sugar syrup feeder and pollen patty. Remember, these nucs will have almost no foragers for the first few days and the nurse bees will need stores to feed themselves and the uncapped brood.

• Return the queen to the original hive. Since all the foragers will come back to this hive, you probably don’t have to add supplements.

• Start checking the nucs for eggs after about three weeks. If you find no eggs or no queen, the nuc may have failed to produce a viable queen or she may have disappeared on a mating flight. If the nuc has no queen you can combine the remaining bees with another hive.

This is a great method of raising queens if you need just a few. I have one of those Langstroth-size boxes that is divided into four two-frame sections with one entrance per side. I start four queens from swarm cells and, after they start laying, I transfer each one into a five-frame nuc.

Last summer I started with four swarm cells and three produced viable queens. By the end of the summer I had three well-populated nucs. In December after I found a dead queen on the landing board of one of my hives, I combined the queenless hive with one of the nucs. The other two nucs are doing fine and, if they make it till spring, I will set them up as new hives or use them to replace weak or failing queens.

It is comforting to keep a nuc on hand for those wintertime emergencies when there are no queens available. It is not difficult to do and you will feel really accomplished after you raise your first queen—even though the bees did all the work.

Rusty