I have written a fair few articles about raising queens, and, as time passes, my experience grows (or maybe my memory fades?). The only beekeeping I have been doing is feeding fondant to most of my nuclei, and a couple of hives that were a little light. So, here’s another queen rearing article that tries to bring it all together. The SEO optimised title “Crowning Glory: Elevating Your Apiary with High-Quality Queen Bees” is cheesy, but apparently these things matter.

Importance Of Queens

Given that, under normal circumstances, there is only one insect in a colony of honey bees that lays the eggs, she’s critical. Her genetics are a combination of those of her parents, and half of these will be passed on to her children (workers and daughter queens). In the case of her male children (drones) only her genetics are represented because drones come from unfertilised eggs. I find that astonishing, by the way, that an unfertilised egg turns into a living creature (parthenogenesis). Mammals do it differently to some birds and the bees, plus the odd amphibian, reptile, and fish.

From a beekeeper’s perspective, a ‘great’ queen is one that the beekeeper decides is great, generally because her colony performs according to the beekeeper’s desires. Typically, this means that they make lots of honey, are not inclined to swarm, and are not unduly defensive. Another important thing about such queens is that they live a long time; hopefully up to four or five years. The life of a queen, assuming diseases are kept at bay and the beekeeper doesn’t squish her or drop her on the ground, tends to be determined by how many eggs she carries and how well she was mated. From her third season onwards, a breeder queen needs to go into a nucleus hive, which slows down her egg laying and gives her a longer life.

If a queen suffers a mishap, it will take the colony some time to effectively replace her. It can easily be a month before eggs are being laid once more by the shiny replacement queen, which means that the population of worker bees takes a hit for a while. Depending on when this happens, it could mean a much smaller honey crop. On the plus side, a brood-free period is a mite killing opportunity.

Genetics Control

Luckily for all beekeepers, you can make good queens without access to the genetics of some incredibly expensive breeder queen. If you want to make queens, make them from the larvae of whatever your best queen is. Who cares if she’s just a hybrid bee in your little garden hive; it’s a start. If you make queens from your best, and cull your worst, you will improve your bees considerably. This is interesting, fun, and worthwhile. Not only that, you will be helping other beekeepers in your area because drones from your hives will carry those desirable traits to virgin queens that they mate with. Equally, if you don’t get rid of your rubbish queens, you are spreading rubbish around.

Don’t get me wrong; it gives you a head start to have a well-bred breeder queen. The selective breeding of queens, where you control both the male and female sides of the equation, is difficult to do in the UK. We have countless bees crammed into a small area, so it’s challenging to find places where there are no drones from random nearby hives. In the UK, apart from in a few isolated spots, the way to achieve control of the queen and drone lines is to use instrumental insemination. That’s something that interests me, but I doubt that I will ever do it.

I like drones, and often have at least one drone comb in my good colonies. Most of my colonies are pretty good most of the time, so maybe this queen rearing malarkey is having an impact. As long as I let good colonies make plenty of drones in the summer, I feel that I have ‘done my bit’ by spreading good genes around the area.

Ideal Conditions

To make big, fat, juicy queens, a certain set of conditions need to be met. These can be set up in a nucleus hive, for a few queens, or a giant cell builder hive, for lots of them. Something to consider; if you make numerous queen cells, you will obviously need enough mating boxes (with bees) to accommodate them. It’s easy to make 40 queen cells, but have you got 40 mating nucs with bees? If not, make fewer. Quality is way more important than quantity.

The perfect environment for building queen cells is a healthy, well nourished colony which has many nurse bees, no open brood, no queen, and both pollen and nectar stores. A brood box that is bursting with bees, many of them one to three weeks old, with no brood (or just a little sealed brood), and plenty of stores, is missing just one thing — a queen. In fact, they are desperate for a queen. When you add your grafted larvae, or frame containing eggs and young larvae, they will immediately pounce on them. The larvae will be generously fed and converted into beautiful queens.

After a few days, you can, if you wish, remove the cells and place them in another hive (or hives) above a queen excluder, with that colony’s queen safely away from them. The bees in this ‘finisher’ colony will complete the task of sealing the cells and looking after them. You can remove them around the 10th day after grafting. In this way, you can add several rounds of grafts to the cell builder, and they will keep starting off cells, although with less enthusiasm, if you keep on doing it.

Grafting Or Not?

It doesn’t matter. Most people who make queens tend to graft, but there are plenty who do not. If you decide to graft, and you use the ubiquitous ‘Chinese grafting tool’ then you will want the young larvae from your chosen breeder queen to be on old, dark comb, or comb built on plastic foundation. I’m biased, but I think grafting is the way to go.

Some people successfully use those Jenter or Cupkit devices, which means that the queen lays eggs in cups that you can then put onto a grafting frame. You get a similar outcome with no grafting. I have no experience of these.

Alternatively, the Miller method should do the job if the weather is good and the hive is strong. There are zillions of resources showing a multitude of methods; the important thing is to set up the ideal conditions as described above.

After Cells Are Made

Producing queen cells is not difficult. One way of checking that they are good cells, if you use the JZ-BZ cups, is to see that there is still royal jelly in the cup. The translucent cups make this possible; if there is jelly left over as the cell is about to emerge, then the larva had more than enough nutrition during development. By the way, several of your grafts may not become queen cells, and that’s fine. Progress, not perfection and all that. I’m happy with 15 cells from 20 grafts.

The harder part of raising queens is turning a sealed queen cell into a mated and laying queen. Whether you use the tiny mating boxes such as Kielers, or mini-plus, or full-sized frames in nucleus boxes, the introduced cell should be protected. You can purchase cell protectors, or wrap them with aluminium foil, leaving the tip exposed. The mating hive should have plenty of bees and stores. The smaller the box, the harder they are to manage, but the cheaper they are in terms of resources (bees, brood, hives, sugar).

Once your queen cell has been added to the queenless colony in the mating box, it’s best to leave it alone for a week. The apideas and Kielers need to be kept topped up with fondant or syrup (fondant is much less messy), and this means at least a weekly check. In poor weather, they might need to be topped up every few days. With larger mating boxes that hold more stores, you can leave them alone for longer.

The whole subject of this important stage of queen rearing is covered brilliantly in Dan Basterfield’s excellent book, ‘Using Apideas’ — I highly recommend it.

An old-fashioned way of requeening a hive was to put a queen cell into the super above the brood box, and not bother finding the old queen. Once the virgin has emerged, she can be allowed into the brood box. Theoretically, she gets mated and then supersedes the old queen. I tried it once, and it worked, but I don’t know how reliable it is.

Mated Queens

Once your new queens are mated and laying, you have to know what you are going to do with them. I like moving them to five-frame nucleus colonies so that they can build up a colony, and you have time to check the laying pattern. If these queens are to be introduced into full-sized colonies, to replace old queens for example, they will have a much better chance of being accepted if they have been laying for at least a month. It takes time for the young queen to build up her pheromone levels.

Queen introduction is a subject for a book. Suffice to say, if the queen is young, healthy and laying eggs (and has been doing so for at least 28 days), the chances of acceptance are pretty good if you use a push in cage. If she has been sat in a queen cage for days, she will be dehydrated and not laying eggs; such a creature can readily be rejected by a colony. It is safest to introduce a non-laying queen to a smaller colony in a nuc until she has plumped back up and got back into the swing of things.

Healthy Bees, Heavy Hives

The new book, co-authored with Paul Horton, comes in two varieties, depending on the printer. As far as I’m aware, many of the books sold online will be printed by Ingram, on slightly less good paper than the books that are sold in shops, and direct from the publisher (Northern Bee Books). The ‘better’ version has very shiny pages and the photos pop. Hopefully, they are both enjoyed by readers; I just thought I’d point that out. Furthermore, there are a select few books out there in which the cover was printed upside down! Not my fault, but apologies to anyone who has one.

Paul and I will be around at the Telford show to sign books at the Northern Bee Books stand. I think it will be at around 12:00 to 13:00, but we will happily deface your copy with our signatures anytime.

If you have read the book and enjoyed it, we would be extremely grateful if you review it on Amazon. Plenty of stars and some kind words go a long way to ensuring that more people become aware of the book. Thanks!