The Beginners Queen Raising Shopping list.

[Neils]

So, touch wood, I currently have 3 full hives and 2 Nucs. 1 Hive I have no intention of using for queen raising, in fact I want to requeen ASAP. 1 is unknown as it was only just built up for winter and 1 I'd like to raise queens from. The Nucs will have to wait and see.

So if we assume that to start with I'll just be wanting to take/make queen cells from one colony, and was intending to use grafting as a method, what would be a suitable quantity of kit to obtain? I don't want to spend a fortune if I can help it, but I could spend a few hundred pounds.

My intention is to use the basic BIBBA/Roger Patterson 50/50 method at the moment, i.e. 50% of my colonies are good and I'd raise queens from them, 50% are grotty and should be re-queened.


I have currently 1 Nuc (3 in total) so I don't really want to have to shell out for more Nucs if I can help it.

I'm going to use Apideas on the recommendation of pretty much everyone in the other thread. How many would be reasonable to start with?

I was going to get 3-4 of those cheap chinese grafting tools as they seem to either work or they don't so getting a couple of them should cover the bases.

Cup Kits? I presume 1 bag of bits would be more than enough to get going with.

Anything else that I need to get going?

[Rosie]

Hi Nellie

I would check what's in a bag of cupkit bits. They usually only have 10 of the plugs that screw onto the frame bars. Once you are in the middle of grafting I'm sure you will want to do 20 to increase your chances of getting enough successful "takes". Are you sure you don't want any more nucs? I would think that someone new to queen rearing would have enough on his plate without diving straight into mini-nucs. I would try to master the rest of the procedure first. Although queen rearing is easy it's a bit like riding a bike - once you get it working you forget all the pitfalls that you had learned to overcome the hard way. It woud be demoralising for you to get a set of lovely queen cells and then have them fail in a mini-nuc at the last stage.

I would also get a metal grafting tool in addition to the Chinese ones as because you might not get on the Chinese ones.

You will need to make sure your eyesight is good or you have a magnifier of some sort. I keep a pair of prescription reading glasses just for grafting. I read with my varifocals but can't see well enough to graft with them.

I also use a scalpel to pare down the cell walls so that I don't have to reach so far down with the grafting tool.

Some people use an 00 paintbrush but I haven't tried mine yet.

Of course you also need to kit to get the call starter colony prepared. It might be just a spare hive or nuc box or something much more specialised, depending on the method you have in mind.

Good luck

Rosie

[Neils]

I've used Nucs for queen raising (of sorts) for the past couple of years, hence why I have two Nucs on the go at the moment but I'd like to be in a position where I had spare Queens rather than colonies. My feeling is that it would be cheaper and easier to raise queens in mini-nucs and be able to use or give them to people than to be queen rearing in 5 frame 14x12 nucs, especially starting with a limited number of full hives to begin with.

My intention is to get those nucs, assuming they survive, into full hives this spring which gives me three nucs, 2 spare full hives (more about to go on order) to play with.

My eyesight is shocking, but fortunately only when it comes to seeing things more than a couple of meters away, close up work is fine :)

[Jon]

The best prices are at buzzy bee shop

http://www.buzzybeeshop.co.uk/page9.html

I would start with a frame for grafts which holds two rows of ten.
You will need 20 of the brown base cup holders which are permanently attached to the frame.
You then need the cream coloured base cups which push on to the base cups.
These get lost and given away so you will need more than 20, I would suggest about 40 or 50 to start with.
The inserts that you graft into are sold in bags of 100

The starter kit for 30 queens is good value at £28.25.
I would buy an extra bag of 100 cell cups at £4.30 to go along with this.

You can never have too many apideas so buy as many as you can afford at £18.50 each.

I have about 20 of my own and was managing another 50 or so for the group last year.
I will probably buy another 10 for myself this spring.

Don't worry about having too many spare queens. You will make lots of new friends who want to cadge them or you can sell a few and recover some of your costs.
I am very short sighted and I graft with my specs off with my nose stuck right into the frame.
I use a paintbrush and find this much easier than chinese grafting tools or any of the other stuff but everyone has their own favourite.

If you plan to do queenright queen rearing don't use a feisty hive as the cell raiser as it will do your head in when you have to find the queen and rearrange all the frames from top box to bottom every ten days or so.
The best candidate is a very strong colony of gentle bees which will tolerate being rearranged at regular intervals.
You can always bolster your cell raiser with frames of sealed brood from other colonies to make sure it is crammed full of young bees at all times.

Anything else you need?

Fondant for your apidea feeder compartments.
Record sheets for your apideas.
Queen cages.
A feeder for your cell raiser.
two Cover cloths for your cell raiser. (cover the 5 frames each side of the cell bar when you open it.)
Somewhere to graft out of the sun - a car or a shed.
A brush for brushing the bees off the frame you are taking grafts from.
Equipment for clipping and marking queens.

[susbees]

Another vote for 000 or 00 sable brushes (they vary between brands) and wet grafting. I have Chinese (from China at 10 for pence) and a stainless steel but find the brush way easier. And don't cut the cells. Like everything else in beekeeping, ten ways...

[fatshark]

Head torch. Ever ready with white and red LEDs. Invaluable for two things ... grafting 'in the field', where the cool bright lights make seeing the tiniest larvae easy, even in old dark comb which you've cut the walls down on. Secondly, using the red lights, you can introduce the sealed queen cell into the mini-nuc in the dark without losing any bees you've already added.

Grafting tools come down to personal preference and mine is for a sable brush. I've got ss and Chinese tools, but much prefer a saliva-dipped brush. The slight twist you can use makes placing the larvae in the new cup very easy (and something I never got to achieve properly with the ss tool).

Of all the essential things I bought for raising queens, the only things I really needed were +2 diopter glasses, the head torch, the sable brush, a handful of JzBz cups and Keiler mini nucs. You can make the frame bar and, if you're careful with your timing, you don't need to cage the cells. You can of course make wax cups, but I can't be bothered.

The only thing new I will be using his year is an incubator - and that's only because my honey warming cabinet has such a well behaved thermostat I should be able to hatch queens in it.

Have fun! The satisfaction of seeing your first laying grafted queen is immense - in my view greater than the first jar of honey.

[Neils]

I was trying to keep my overall budget this year to under <£250, I think I might miss that by a considerable margin (maybe I should change jobs to pricing IT projects for the government, I think I have the requisite ability to underestimate just how much it's going to cost).

My queen rearing list is now:

5 Apideas
2 feeding trays
10 spare apidea frames
30 queen cup kit doodads
2 chinese grafting tools
1 grafting brush - As lots of you seem to prefer the brush I figured I'd get hold of one and give it a try. The grafting tools were easy enough but I like trying other things out.
100 Additional cups.

I think that's a reasonable starting point. 5 Apideas to 3 Nucs to 2 spare hives for this year. We have two colonies that definitely need new queens sooner rather than later, everything after that is gravy.

[susbees]

We have two colonies that definitely need new queens sooner rather than later, everything after that is gravy. Interesting use for surplus stock, do you use a sieve?

[Jon]

Plastic apidea frames are expensive for what you get and are easily made with a bit of correx and a box cutter knife.
Cut a top bar the same size as the plastic topbars and attach a couple of side bars with a bit of tape.
Once the comb is drawn and attached to the sides it will be just as strong as a plastic frame.

[Calum]

Hi
I like Jons correx idea, I have just made myself 16 three frame hives - good enough for starting queens off with a shook swarm of 3 soup ladels.
Or starting on topbars is also really good as you can easily hang the topbar in a frame with some cable ties - the Apediea frames contents gets lost when the queen and attending bees are transferred to a larger domicile.
Chinese grafting tool is excellent, use mine alot.
And this complete grafting (http://www.karl-jenter-shop.com/index.php?a=51)set for about 65 pounds with everything you need. Cadged frame with removable plastic cups where the queen can be placed. That way all eggs are the same age - so they can be processes at the same time (become grubs together, cells close together, queens hatch together) saving on multiple trips to the breeder hives. No grafting needed increasing the number of queens raised / cup. There are plugs that the cups are placed in that slot into the frame addition and cages that fit these so when the queens emerge they cannot get at each other.
Between mine & my mentors we raised 80-90 queens in three weeks last summer. The limiting factor was queenless colonies to raise the queens and housing for the virgins.
And some candy for feeding is all you will need. Untill you want to make 50-80 queens then you'll start to think about an incubator and maybe a instrumental insemination kit... :)

[gavin]

Interesting use for surplus stock, do you use a sieve?

I prefer to use them in Queen of Puddings myself (where's me coat?!).

Some people use grass stems with the end chewed flat.

[Neils]

What's turned up so far:

2.5kg of Ambrosia fondant (out of interest, why fondant and not syrup?)
5 Apideas and frames
2 Apidea feeders to experiment with
1 brush because lots of people recommended grafting with it
2 chinese grafting tools because I've used them before
The 30 queen cups/rollers
A bee brush.

I already have 3 nucs, one of which will obviously take the queen from the colony I use to raise the cells leaving two nucs to muck around with and I've got two full spare hives, possibly three at a stretch.

I still need a few other nicknacks so will be trying out inspection cloths this year (one for each apiary and never the twain shall meet).

My plan is to use the allotment which I'll reduce to two colonies (of mine) assuming they come through winter of course, one to graft from, one to raise the queen cells.

So in total, I should have:

2 Full colonies to raise from
5 Apideas
3 Nucs

Does that sound reasonable for a first attempt?

[Jon]

Looking good
You should rope in a few mates with apideas to use the queen cells produced.
Producing queen cells in quantity is easy when conditions are right and you will be looking for a home for loads of them.
Make sure you are grafting from a good queen as rubbish in - rubbish out very much applies to queen rearing.
You can use thick syrup instead of fondant if you want but the bees can fill up all the cells very quickly and you will need to swap frames in and out if the apidea gets clogged up with stores.
I sometimes fill the feeder with dry sugar and wet it with a water spray.

[Neils]

Good point about the syrup, brain not in gear.

I guess the next silly question is how long you can keep a laying queen in an apidea. I'd assume that with only a few bees for company that swarming isn't an issue per se, but presumably a queen capable of laying up a full hive isn't going to be happy kept in an apidea with room for about 10 minutes worth of laying.

[Jon]

You can keep a queen in an apidea as long as you like.
The trick is to make sure there are the right number of bees with her.
Once the queen starts to lay you can put the excluder on so that she cannot escape.
Too many bees will lead to absconding and not enough bees means that the apidea cannot defend itself against wasps or robbers.
The trick is to move frames of brood between apideas to keep the right number of bees present.
A frame of sealed brood is a good present for an apidea with a virgin queen.
You can replace that frame with a frame of drawn comb or one with a strip of foundation.
You can also remove the feeder and replace it with two frames and if needs be - or put on an apidea super with 5 more frames in it.
There is research to show that it is best to let the queen lay for 3 weeks or so in the apidea before using her for requeening something else. Queens removed too soon are often killed or superseded - I think it is something to do with pheromone level.

[Adam]

Thornes now have a mini-nuc for £9. (Not in the mini-nuc section but under "The queen - queen rearing") Don't know if its OK or not.

For my first year I fixed the brown cell cups onto a frame bar with wax and grafted into that with a plastic grafting tool which I subsequently lost in the grass. I have a chinese tool which I don't like much and brushes from an artist shop which I have used with reasonable sucess. You could get some 9 mm dowel and make your own cups with wax.

One old boy I spoke to uses queen (play) cups and grafts into those and removes the queen.

An option for filling the feeder :- Pour in dry sugar and then put in a LITTLE water. Tip the mini-nuc to one side and allow it to dry. You then have sugar adhering to the feeder so it won't fall out, but as it's on a slope, you can subsequently add water or syrup and they can walk down to it on the sugar ramp without drowning. Mini-nucs need regular checking for levels of food as the small colony can run out quite quickly. The flexible 'crown board' can be bent upwards or slid across and syrup poured in without having to remove it and disturb the bees. Wood is better as a float on syrup. Polystyrene tends to get eaten - especially when they're hungry as it absorbs water and my guess is they break it down to get at the syrup within. (Yes they do nibble at the edges of the mini-nucs).

As Jon writes, you can swap frames of brood. However a small number of bees in a mini-nuc will naturally restrict the queens laying and the colony will build up only relatively slowly in many cases.

I leave queens for several weeks in mini-nucs and only clip and mark them when they leave. Older queens tend to be slower and less wriggly and easier to mark. Virgins just crash about all over the place.

You can probably do it for under £100 and then get a couple of polynucs and some frames and foundation and still be under your budget.

You can obtain specs from Poundland and if you break them, it doesn't really matter.

[Neils]

In total, ignoring the kit I already had such as the Nucs I came in at a shade over £180 for the apideas, grafting tools and 30 queen cup/cages. plus a fiver for some Ambrosia fondant. The bee brush and a few other bits and bobs don't count as they'll be used for other things as well do I'm not counting them as specific to queen rearing.

I could have not bothered buying spare frames and feeders for the apideas I guess which would have saved £30 so you could easily do it with "premium" kit for about £150 all in.

[susbees]

Thornes now have a mini-nuc for £9. (Not in the mini-nuc section but under "The queen - queen rearing") Don't know if its OK or not.
.........

I leave queens for several weeks in mini-nucs and only clip and mark them when they leave. Older queens tend to be slower and less wriggly and easier to mark. Virgins just crash about all over the place.


Hmm...not sure what you'd get for £9. They had apideas for £30 on the stand at the NHS!!!

And I agree. Got quite good at catching mated queens mid-air last summer whilst marking out of apideas.