After a stuttering start, our queen production is now in full swing, so I thought I’d share how we do it. This probably won’t suit everybody, but it works for us. A big part of queen production is being organised, getting the timings right, and having a process that is familiar and effective. Another important factor is mindset; those who embark on the journey of being self-sufficient in queens must be prepared for failure. I suppose that applies to beekeeping more generally. It doesn’t always go to plan, but that’s okay. The main challenge is our weather; sometimes it’s rubbish and queens don’t mate in time.
Breeder Queens
We have three breeder queens right now, although I have only grafted larvae from one so far this season. This is a yellow-dot queen from Jolanta (J9 line), which has not shown signs of swarming and was a good honey producer, especially in summer. As many of my bees seem to be the type that build up strong in spring, I wanted to use this queen because she does not get carried away early in the season but has a giant workforce in July.
The other breeder queen is one of mine, also a yellow-dot, with gentle bees and good honey production. They are typical of my normal bees and a pleasure to work with. Finally, a recent addition is an instrumentally inseminated queen from Northumberland Honey, which is a current-season queen. She has settled into her nucleus colony and is laying well, so I will be grafting from her in a week or two. This one is nearly pure Apis mellifera mellifera (Amm); I just thought I’d try one and see how it goes.
My breeder queens start off in single polystyrene langstroth nucleus boxes, and I add a second box when they need space. I’m also continually pulling out sealed brood because I do not want them to swarm. I have them all in the apiary where I have my ‘grafting shed’ which is also my honey extracting room. Although I have been known to graft in my van, I prefer to be sat at a desk!
Drones
My queens are open-mated, which means that I have little control over the male side of the mating equation. The virgins will be mated with 10–20 different drones, some of which are hopefully from my colonies. I don’t know how reliable BeeBase is for showing accurate numbers of apiaries within mating distance of my place, but apparently there are 271 apiaries within 10 km. At least 50 colonies within 10 km are mine, but that’s a drop in the ocean.
Anyway, I do have at least one drone comb in my production colonies, and if I ever get horrible bees I tend to re-queen and scrape out drone pupae. I like to think that my drones are spreading their goodness around the local area, and that most of them are from good stock. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, says somebody, and so far, my mated queens have tended to create strong and well-behaved colonies.
Cell Builders
I started my first cell builder colony in mid-May this year, which is fairly typical. Occasionally, when we get fine spring weather, there is a temptation to start earlier, but in my experience this has never worked out well. In my area, May is a bit of a rubbish month for mating queens. Going by this season, June is too!
My cell builder colonies get boosted with frames of emerging brood from other colonies in the apiary (not from outside) so that, two weeks later, they are very strong with plenty of young bees present. Shortly before grafting, the queen is separated from the rest, in a small colony set to the side/above/below, and I make sure there are no cells/eggs/young larvae present.
Timing
(1) The cell builder gets the extra frames of sealed/emerging brood two weeks before grafting day. The grafts will be taken from a frame of newly emerged larvae from one of the breeder queens. I like to place a dark comb or drawn plastic frame into the breeder queen’s nuc five to six days before grafting day. I also feed syrup and pollen substitute to the breeder colony.
The dark comb or drawn plastic frame make grafting with the Chinese grafting tool simple. With soft, new comb, it’s much more difficult, as the reed of the tool easily punctures the base of the cell.
Grafting
On grafting day the cell builder is made queenless. The queen moves to another box with any open brood. There should be only sealed brood and plenty of bees in the cell builder.
(2) I brush bees off the frame from the breeder colony and carry it twenty metres to my ‘grafting shed’. I graft into JZBZ cups with a Chinese grafting tool, assisted by a head torch and magnifying lens. As I only graft 20–26 cells at a time, it does not take long. It is especially quick and easy with plastic frames. (3) The grafted larvae mounted in the grafting frame go into the centre of the cell builder, which is fed with syrup and a pollen substitute. I sometimes place a frame of foundation into this colony too, which reduces their tendency to build brace comb around the developing cells.
Incubator
At grafting day, the larvae are 4 days into the 16 days it takes to make a queen. (4) In 7–8 days time, I remove the sealed queen cells from the cell builder, brush off the bees, and carry them cautiously to the grafting shed, where I also keep my incubator. I take each queen cell off the cell bar and place it into a Nicot ‘roller cage’ then into the incubator, which is set to 34 degrees C and 60% humidity.
Next, I do another graft, as before, and place the newly populated grafting frame into the cell builder. This process continues as long as I want, or as long as I have mating nucs available. Frames of emerging brood are regularly added to the cell builder, replacing combs of stores, to ensure a constant supply of young bees. Before new grafts are added I always carry out a rigorous search for any ‘rogue’ queen cells made from eggs/larvae on inserted comb, which are destroyed.
Using an incubator is not essential – it’s perfectly okay to leave the cells inside the cell builder until they are about to emerge, then move them straight to mating nucs. However, this means that you have to wait longer before you can do the next graft, and there is a higher risk of a rogue virgin emerging and killing the cells.
Mating Nucs
Two days before the queens are due to emerge (10 days after grafting) they are taken from the incubator and placed in my Carricel portable incubator, which is taken to the van, and plugged into the 12V power supply. I then drive them to our mating apiary, making sure I bring along my cell protectors.
We use mini-plus hives and Kielers as mating boxes. By the time the first round of cells are ready, most of our mini-plus colonies are 4 boxes tall, and close to swarming. These contain over-wintered queens or, if they have already been split, young current-season queens. We split these boxes to create singles, which have sealed brood, stores, bees and no queen. (5) Some new queen cells go into these single mini-plus hives, which make fine mating nucs.
Next, if we still need to find homes for cells, we set up the Kielers. These will have been cleaned and sterilised in the winter. We fill the feed compartments with fondant (Apipasta), then add a large scoop of young bees and the queen cell. We shake young bees from nearby colonies, mostly from the supers, into an empty nuc, then scoop them into mating nucs as required. The Kielers are kept sealed up and stored in a storeroom for three days, with occasional squirts of water being fired into them through the air vents.
Thereafter, they go out onto mating stands and the entrances are opened. By this time, the virgin queens have emerged, but we don’t look inside for another seven days. If the queens are not mated within 2–3 weeks, we start again with another cell.
Moving On
With a production line of new grafts every week, the pressure is on to move mated queens on to full-sized nuclei to make room for the next queen cells. This is my main bottleneck; I currently have 30 populated mating nucs, but most contain virgins. I have delayed any more grafting for at least a week because I don’t have anywhere to put any more cells, apart from into newly made up nucs. I don’t like the idea of putting a cell into a production colony.
Kieler mating nucs do a job, but they are small, and cannot hold mated queens for long. (6) I like to move these queens into newly made up nucs; a frame of stores, 1–2 frames of sealed brood, bees, and some drawn comb or foundation. These get moved to where I need them and fed syrup. If I make late-season nucs, they have more brood (3 frames) and get plenty of syrup. They will be sold next April, if the queens are good, or promoted to production colonies. After removing a mated queen from a Kieler, I add a new cell quickly (in a day or two).
With mini-plus hives, there is more space, so queens can stay in them for longer, and more boxes can be added to create more space still. I like to move them on into nucs as with the Kielers in mid-summer, but later on, I build them into two or three box colonies and take them through winter.
Using The Queens
As I have said, a lot of mated queens go into nucleus colonies for the winter. However, if we have plenty of queens, we also try to re-queen production colonies that contain queens coming to the end of their second season. I use home-made push-in-cages for this purpose, as they work very well. However, the following spring I always find that some of these have been changed by the bees, as evidenced by no coloured dot and no clipped wing.
I do not sell queens, I sell nucs. Sometimes, if the weather has been poor (like now) the matings don’t happen. It’s very frustrating having to kill unmated queens or finding later on that they turn into drone layers. A lot of work goes into making queens, whether they turn out well or not. This is what raising queens in the UK is all about; you have to accept that sometimes the Gods are against you. But when it goes well, it’s a beautiful thing.
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