Lazy man queen rearing

[Jon]

This is my lazy man's method of queen rearing.
it works if you just need a few extra queens rather than some kind of an industrial production line.

Method One
Wait until a favoured colony starts to make swarm preparations.
Before any queen cells are sealed, do an artificial swarm leaving the old queen with the flyers on the original site in a new brood box.

Set the brood and nurse bees aside marking any good queen cells you want to keep with a drawing pin.
Wait until the queen cells are 2 days from hatching.
In an ideal world, there will be cells over several frames.
To make up a nuc, lift out a frame with a nice cell into the empty nuc. Add 2 frames of stores and a frame of pollen if there is one, and shake in some extra bees.
Bring the nuc to your mating site.
I only have one site so I just set it to the side.
You can check if the cell has hatched 2 days later but other than that leave alone for at least two weeks bofore checking if the queen is laying.

Method Two
This is when all the queen cells are on the same frame.
Two days from hatching, I cut out the queen cells and place each one in a sealed roller cage.
These are slightly tapered so the cell can be wedged gently inside.
You need to brush off most of the bees or they will get in the way of your scalpel.
QCs hanging down at the bottom are easily removed without damaging them. Those in the middle of the frame are trickier to cut out.

Place the roller cages between two frames like this.

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You need to separate the queens like this as the first one out will kill the others or leave with a small cast swarm if there are enough flyers.
The queens should hatch 2 days later and you can split up the colony to make nucs with them. There is no problem with queen acceptance as the queens are with their own bees.

Neither of these methods involves any skills like grafting.

Method three involves removing the larvae from any queen cell and replacing it with a grub from a better colony.
You can then proceed as in method one or two above.
I haven't tried this yet myself.

None of this is rocket science but it works for me. I got about 20 queens mated last year.

[gavin]

bMy favourite method is a little more directed but still a grafting-free zone. For Popz's situation, I have a few reservations which will go below. The basic method was described by Chris Slade on the Irish list, but draws on ideas by Wedmore, Hooper and others.

Build up a strong colony to fill two brood boxes and, ideally, have them working one or two supers as well. In the mid to late rape season (its OK for some, isn't it?!), stop giving them extra space so that the congestion might trigger the swarming impulse. If you don't have a decent early season flow you may have to feed and maybe go without the supers.

If they have filled two brood boxes and a super or two but are not already making queen cells then you can encourage them to do so by separating the old queen from the eggs, young brood and nurse bees. Rebuild the colony from the bottom up. Floor; brood box with old queen, sealed brood, stores, and the frames not used above (some empty ones help reduce the risk of Q cells in this box); Q excluder; super or supers; second Q excluder; second brood box with frames with eggs and young brood, split in the middle by a frame of pollen, pollen also at the outside of the eggs and young brood frames, some honey stores, sealed brood to fill the space; crown board; roof. The nurse bees move to the top box, the crowded colony and the distance from the queen almost always stimulates queen raising, and the pollen near the eggs encourages well-nourished queens.

After a week or so, replace the top queen excluder with a Wedmore split board. Chris Slade puts mesh over holes made in this board which allows feeding across the split colony and keep the odour unified. The split board and two vertical plywood dividers creates three nuc from the top brood box with no additional boxes required. Each needs one or two sealed queen cells (nope, each needs one only!), and it is also wise to shake in additional young bees from the bottom box and stuff the entrances with grass to keep them in for a day or two, otherwise your nucs on top can become depleted.

You can check the little nucs around queen hatching time, but after that leave well alone for around three weeks as until then they are sensitive to disturbance and unlikely to be laying yet. Once the queens are laying you can transfer the colonies into boxes and move to a different site, or use to requeen the colony below, or build up one of them in the box they are in.

Preparation: early in the season you need to have made sure that the top brood box makes a bee-tight combination with the Wedmore split board and the plywood vertical dividers.

Three-way Wedmore or National split boards: http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/natsplit.html

If the strong colony is not the one you want to breed from, no problem. When you judge the strong colony is about to make queen cells, take a frame of eggs from your breeder colony. Giving them a frame of foundation in the brood nest a 4-7 days before makes this easy. Trim the frame 1/2 to 2/3 of the way down with a sharp knife where there are eggs and/or very young larvae. Along the cut edge open up with a match every third cell with an egg to splay out the walls slightly. Destroy the eggs in the intervening two cells. Place this frame in the middle of the brood nest in the part of the colony where the queen has no access. If you have everything as you want it, the bees will raise a beautiful row of queen cells along the cut edge. Carefully cut these out with that sharp knife and distribute to the three nucs, pinning them through a piece above the Q cell into a depression made in the receiving comb. They are fragile for the first few days, so mature them upstairs first. Ensure that the bees in the bottom box have not carried on with their swarming impulse.

Three nucs per strong colony works for me. Some fail, I can re-queen from them, and I can give a couple away (or maybe even sell them). Advantages over Jon's method are that relying on naturally swarmy colonies isn't always the best policy, you don't need so many nuc boxes (or any), you can be more directed in breeding, the nucs get some benefit of warmth from below.

The method popularised by Vince Cook but which came from Harry Cloake was to break down a massive colony into a ring of inward-facing nucs (3 to 20 of them, at least three frames each, some of which can come from other colonies) pointing at the original site in the middle, and taking one with the old queen away. The queen cells can be from that original colony or raised elsewhere.

All of this requires a good feel for the state of the colony, what conditions trigger the swarming impulse, and how many young bees you need to allow for a proportion returning back to mum. The simpler approach is just to distribute queen cells, frames of brood, and stores to nuc boxes and to move these boxes away to a different site for mating.

Reservations for Mull beekeepers building up from a small base:

You need a supply of mature, healthy drones from several colonies. Building up in this way from one colony on one isolated site could bring problems. I'd put your queen cells or virgins into nucs and move these nucs to good sites for mating.

You may need to keep feeding.

Until you have a few season's experience, things *will* go wrong. Use your experienced folk, and don't be discouraged if it doesn't work.

I'll try to take a set of pictures this May to make following this easier.

all the best

Gavin

[gavin]

The bee-tight assembly of the three-nucs-in-a-box requires some care, so I'll explain further.

Before building up onto two brood boxes, identify the brood box to go on top. Make that Wedmore split board (easy enough if I can do it). For your selected brood box (many of mine are second hand and so vary slightly) fashion thin plywood sheets to sit where the frames sit but leave no gaps whatsoever. Starting with a cardboard template is helpful. They need to meet the raised strips on the floor, fit perfectly down the sides, be shaped to sit on the rails with no gaps there, and be flush with the top of the box. You also need a sheet of thicker ply to act as a new crown board - no raised edge and no feed holes so that it makes a bee-tight seal with the top rim of the brood box and the tops of the plywood dividers. Mine has a raised edge on one side only so that I can flip it over and use it as a normal crown board later.

G.

[Jon]

You could even combine these two methods, starting off Queen cells as Gavin suggests and then transferring them to nucs a couple of days before hatching.
I make nucs out of correx board I fish out of skips. They are held together with gaffer tape. These will last for years and you can always make a repair with more gaffer tape.

You can even overwinter bees in these if you insulate with 25mm polystyrene but I mainly use them for mating nucs.
I use foam or polystyrene rectangle dummy boards to reduce them in size down to 2 frames if necessary.

[gavin]

Yes, the two can be combined. I forgot to say that the bottom box builds up quickly and can be a useful late-summer production colony, even with the old queen. Give it one of the nucs to replace the old queen and it can be a vigorous colony ideal for the heather season.

What we need is an election, and I understand that there will be one conveniently timed for the next swarming season. One of the main parties has local supporters who put up large correx boards on the local telegraph poles and prominent trees, and I always wanted an excuse to take them down early. [Though given my role as a supposedly responsible admin I'll have to say that I can't possibly recommend this to people.]

Do you have plans for cutting up and folding the correx?

G.

[POPZ]

Gavin - just great all that info but will take a while to get to grips with it in my head. Sounds really very interesting. I will brew on it for a while, talk with my very able mentor here and would like to think that we might be able to give it a go this season. As to drones, I think I should be on a really good patch here. Two different apiaries either side of mine, each a mile way and woodland that I am pretty sure has a feral/s colony lurking around somewhere. One colony is Amm and the other some very aged Italians who imigrated here some years ago! The ferals could well be remnants from when I started some hives some 20 odd years ago. But my husbandry was not as it should have been - maybe due to 5 kids, loads of sheep, some lovely Galloways, Higlanders, holiday makers, boat trips and generally trying to keep sane!

By the way - so many of my ladies out today that it felt more like full flow on - the garden was also full of them on our mass of snowdrops and some heather that is blooming at the moment - loads of pollen coming in, hazel, snowdrop, crocus and heather.

Jon - now you tell me!! Having spent the day carefully cutting up ply for more nucs you come up with a great and simple wheeze - especially at electioneering time. Thanks.

[Trog]

Gavin - just great all that info but will take a while to get to grips with it in my head. Sounds really very interesting. I will brew on it for a while, talk with my very able mentor here and would like to think that we might be able to give it a go this season.


If the 'very able mentor' is who I think it is, they may be equally confuzzled ;)

[gavin]

No pressure then Trog!

I have to admit that I struggle with any new description of this kind of procedure. After you've tried it a couple of time - and made mistakes - it starts to become easy and obvious. And just text without diagrams is doubly difficult. Or trebly.

At least I'll be around to ask nearer the time if you like. As will Jon I hope. BTW, ply beats correx any day of the week. It is just that Jon's frugality appeals.

Five kids Popz?! One more than me then. And I have no sheep or holidaymakers to disturb my beekeeping either.

G.

[POPZ]

My favourite method is a little more directed but still a grafting-free zone. For Popz's situation, I have a few reservations which will go below. The basic method was described by Chris Slade on the Irish list, but draws on ideas by Wedmore, Hooper and others. Gavin

I thought I had read something along the lines you are talking about. Found it last night. Jack Berry's 'Queen Rearing with Simplicity'. There does seem to be some similarity, but the added bonus of diagrams. You see, I need to have pictures/diagrams!

[Jon]

Do you have plans for cutting up and folding the correx?
G.

Nothing so formal.
If you can make a paper aeroplane you are over qualified for this task
I use a pizza cutter for making the folds and a box cutter knife for making the cuts.
Don't press too hard on the folds as the correx will get punctured.
If you use a wooden batten as a guide, you get a nice straight edge on the cuts or folds.
If used for mating nucs, a few mm is neither here nor there as long as the frames fit in.
If you have a frame with you during assembly it helps.

If using election propaganda, make sure you fold the cheesy grins to the inside of the box.
I have a few lids with earnest faces on the inside I would definitely not want to be associated with.



It is just that Jon's frugality appeals.
G.

Is that another quip about my alleged Scots forebears?

[gavin]

If you had the faces on the outside couldn't you train your bees to fly into the mouths of people you don't like?

I was impressed by your frugality *despite* your absence of clear Scottish ancestors.

Here's a Wedmore split board, needing a good clean before the new season:

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[POPZ]

A neighbour of mine is dividing his colony this weekend. He is going through all the normal procedures except preceding any building of swarm cells. Just moving the hive to one side and putting new hive on original site. All as normal except that moving queen and frame of brood into one hive so forcing the queenless colony to immediately develop one of the worker eggs into queens.

I thought an emergency queen was not a good idea from the breeding point of view as well as egg production??

[gavin]

Is this the Warre beekeeper?

This kind of 'walk-away split' seems commonplace in the US (damn those internet fora!) but only works when you have a hive boiling with bees and occupying a stack of boxes tall enough to rival the Empire State. And heaps of local drones, all raring to go and chase queens. Is that the position on Mull at the moment?

Go tell him Uncle Gavin says that his technique is poor. Work with the bees, and wait and encourage them to start the process themselves. Most of us have had queen raising and mating problems in the last few years. That is probably due to mating in poor weather more than anything.

In that light it worried me (as you may recall) Popz that you were feeding your bees to bring them on. If they are now filling boxes, I'd give them extra space ... let them draw more comb and more bees for you, then encourage queen cells a little later when the weather on Mull is a little more reliable.

But there's nothing like a diversity of opinions to learn from .... ;)

G.

[Jon]

I have been going through my colonies this last week removing any frames full of stores and replacing them with empty drawn comb so that the queen has room to lay.
There is a lot of nectar coming in from dandelion at the moment.

[POPZ]

I will tell himself exactly what Uncle Gavin thinks of, not only his ideas, but also of the whole system he uses! I am sure that it will lead to some very interesting discussion. Diversity of opinion is the order of the day methinks!
R

[gavin]

I have been going through my colonies this last week removing any frames full of stores

Show-off!

[Jon]

We have had better weather and bees were still flying at 7.30 this evening. Balmy Belfast.

[Trog]

I will tell himself exactly what Uncle Gavin thinks of, not only his ideas, but also of the whole system he uses! I am sure that it will lead to some very interesting discussion. Diversity of opinion is the order of the day methinks!
R

Before you give him the chance to boot you into the middle of next week, perhaps you can get some floor debris from him first?

[Jon]

If you had the faces on the outside couldn't you train your bees to fly into the mouths of people you don't like?

I bumped into a neighbour earlier this evening who works for one of the political parties here. He let slip that he has to help remove the election propaganda on May 7th.
He has promised me as much Correx as a man could possibly want so I may well be making the folds so that the nuc entrance is directly through the mouth of the (hopefully) defeated candidate. Apparently he has a barn full of the stuff from past elections.

[POPZ]

Before you give him the chance to boot you into the middle of next week, perhaps you can get some floor debris from him first?
Floor debris is on it's way and mongrel queen is not available. She is far too too productive as opposed to the pure bred that is useless!!

[Trog]

Ha! Well done, Popz. Only one more beekeeper to persuade, then that'll be all the floor debris done. So, he's fallen in love with his mongrel queen after all! Maybe we can have the 'useless' one instead ... perhaps she's just unhappy with her current accommodation!! :p