Breeding the Best Honey Bees: Selecting a Quality Queen Bee

Queen bee with workers on pollen frame

Now that we are in that time of crazy colony growth, it won’t be long until some people start to raise their first queens of the season. My experience and research into weather patterns tells me to hold off until later because the weather can be quite unreliable for mating flights in May. The best … Read more

Losing Queens On Mating Flights

a row of hives beside a field

Virgin Queens Are Not Making It Back I’m deep into writing a book, with the deadline approaching faster than my output of words, but it seems wrong to neglect my blog for too much longer. This one is not very scientific, just some observations and musings about some changes that I have seen in the … Read more

Practical Tips About Queens

Newly emerged virgin queen bee

Finding, Marking and Introducing Queens As any regular reader of my blog will know, I’m obsessed with two things; queens and Varroa mites. Queens are essential to honey bees, as mothers are to all families. Mites are horrible things that cause the death of colonies, so obviously, I need to keep their number down to safe levels. … Read more

How I Make Queens

Honey bee queen with yellow dot on thorax

Grafting, Cell Builders And Mating I’m good at learning from the successes, mistakes and wisdom of others. Once, we had a fishing tournament at school that I’d entered. Never having fished before, I consumed a library of books on the subject and, incredibly, I won. It wasn’t difficult; I think I caught two fish and … Read more

Are Small Queen Cells OK?

Sealed queen cells on a grafting frame

Update, Sept 2025: I am now almost certain that small cells and small queens are nearly always less good than larger ones. Small cells on combs can be different, because emergency cells look small, but aren’t necessarily. Small cells on a grafting bar – I don’t want them. As for small queens, I now kill … Read more