The reasons I raise honey bee queens are not those one might expect from reading much of the beekeeping press. There are three of them: (1) it’s extremely enjoyable and rewarding, (2) the resulting queens are fantastic, and (3) by learning about queen rearing my understanding of how honey bees function has been turbocharged. I am not on a mission to ban imports, nor do I wish to lecture others on the best type of queens for their beekeeping. It’s always been my view that each individual must forge their own path, and at the end of it, they will realise that I’m right! Not really. One thing bees are good at is making beekeepers eat humble pie.
Boomsville, Cheshire
Here in my part of the world it would appear that, yet again, the bees are booming even at this early stage. I see thousands of dandelions already in bloom, blossoms everywhere, and even a horse chestnut tree near one apiary looks like it will flower in the next week or two. It all seems to be coming on strong and early, but it’s been that way for a few seasons now. Last season, with brambles coming in June and lasting but a week, the bulk of the summer was quite sparse, nectar-wise. This could be the pattern for the future, but hopefully not. With our unpredictable weather, anything can happen. Moreover, some farmers plant pollinator-friendly seed mixes under the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) scheme, which can be a real boost if you are lucky enough to be nearby.
I found my first swarm cells in a nucleus colony the other day. The queen was there, so I just squished the cells and gave them another box. I know – people will tell you that once they make cells, it’s too late to stop them swarming – but it’s not always the case. This was the only nuc of mine that did not already have a ‘double-brood’ configuration, or even ‘triple-brood’ in some cases. My bees tend to grow very rapidly early in the season, so a mere six frames in a nucleus box is soon inadequate. My over-wintered nucs are being handed over to new owners in eight days time, assuming they behave themselves and stay put.
So, although it seems early, it’s time to talk about making queens. The bees are already thinking about it. If you want to make more bees, a great time to do it is when the bees are primed to do it themselves, and we can use their urges to help make it a painless process.
Going Double-Brood Then Splitting
Very common in the USA, this is an effective way to achieve two wonderful things in one technique; stop them swarming, and turn one colony into two. More bees! What we like to do is add a second brood box above an existing brood box which contains a strong colony. It’s good to have some drawn comb in the second box, but if the colony is strong and the weather is good, and the nectar is flowing, foundation should be fine. A frame feeder with some thin syrup can help get combs drawn out. With no queen excluder, the bees will expand into the extra space and the queen will soon be laying in both boxes.
After a month, maybe six weeks, it should be ready to be split into two colonies. One option is to redistribute frames between the brood boxes if necessary to ensure that both have brood in all stages. The brood box to be taken away obviously needs a floor and lid, and it should go to another apiary. One box keeps the queen, the other one can either make a new queen, receive a queen cell from a cell builder colony, or receive a new queen.
This is, in fact, an opportunity to follow my Vertical Nurse-Box Requeening (VNBR) method, with a slight variation being that the queen can stay in the bottom box. The top box (separated from the bottom box by an excluder and some supers) will attract most of the nurse bees and be receptive to a new queen after 24–48 hours. Then the bottom box (with original queen) can be taken away to another site.
A second option is to have the sealed brood in one box and all open brood in the other, and combine the splitting with appropriately timed oxalic acid treatment, as described by Randy Oliver – see the bottom of the VNBR post.
Making Use of Nucs
A simple way to divert the bees’ attention away from swarming is to use nucleus boxes. When a colony in a single brood box is expanding like a mushroom cloud in early April, it’s time to give them space and remove a frame or two of sealed brood to slow them down a bit.
They get space in the form of supers, above a queen excluder (if used) which is for both bees and honey. But they also need comb for the queen to lay in, so we often remove a frame of sealed brood from the brood box (with associated bees) and replace it with drawn comb or foundation.
The sealed brood goes into a nucleus box, and several can be collected from strong hives in the apiary, and all stored in the nuc (we use the polystyrene ones). Mixing up bees and brood does not seem to result in the bees fighting.
What to do with these frames of brood and bees? One option is to create a cell builder for the production of queens. Another is to boost weak, but otherwise healthy, colonies with a frame of pupae – in 10 days they will gain an extra 4,000+ bees to help the colony grow. Yet another possibility is to add a queen or queen cell to a nuc containing 2–3 frames of brood and bees, plus drawn comb or foundation; feed them syrup and, hey presto, you’ve got a nucleus colony that can be promoted to a hive in a month or so.
I am not a massive fan of boosting weaker production colonies with brood frames because I would rather make up a new colony with a new queen/queen cell and use that to replace any weaker ones. They are weak for a reason, and I’d rather not try to prop them up, as I know I’ll get more honey from the stronger colonies.
Raising Queens
Following the above methods of relieving swarm pressure does lead to extra colonies. If you split a double brood colony into two singles, one will have no queen. By simply leaving it alone for a month, apart from adding supers as needed, the queenless hive will nearly always sort itself out. They’ll have a lovely new queen which you can mark and clip later on. The bees are superb at making a queen when they require one; all we have to do is ensure they start with a balanced colony with ample nutrition and plenty of bees.
Similarly, if you choose to make up queenless nucs, they will requeen themselves if they have the resources. I make sure they have thin syrup and a protein patty, just in case, and leave them alone for a month.
Having made these new colonies and left them to make queens, you may feel that you have too many colonies for your liking. That’s not a problem. You can combine the new colony with the old one, and let the bees decide which queen they want. I do think it is advisable to take a nucleus colony or two through the winter (or lots more, depending on your scale) so that you have options in the following spring should you suffer any losses.
I make queens using a cell builder colony, into which I place grafted larvae in plastic cups. It’s possible to make great queens using a nucleus colony set up – see below.
Cell Building – One Off
If you only want to do one or two rounds of grafting with the goal of producing 10–30 good queens, you can make up a queenless nucleus colony with no open brood, and graft into that. You can make up a nucleus box with a frame feeder of thin syrup and a pollen frame, the rest being a mix of sealed brood and empty comb. Then, shake bees from other colonies into this box – it’s safest to shake them from super frames so that you don’t shake in a queen. I’d shake in several frames of bees from 3 to 4 colonies. Any foragers will fly back home, leaving a queenless nuc populated with young bees. The more, the merrier.
You can then graft into the queenless nuc, safe in the knowledge that they are hopelessly queenless and have many young bees eager to make cells. Five days after adding the grafts, remove them to go into a finisher colony (or incubator). You can usually get away with adding another batch of grafts straight away, but check all the combs for any rogue cells, and remove any found. Sealed brood continues emerging throughout, replenishing young bees, so the quality of cells in the second batch should be high. After the second batch of cells is sealed, it’s best to leave one cell for the nuc and let them grow into a queen-right colony. The nurse bees have done their job by creating two rounds of cells.
A cell finisher colony can be any good queen-right colony. Just make sure the cells are away from the queen, above an excluder, with a super or two between the brood nest and the cells. If you are only doing one round of grafts, you can wait until ten days after grafting, then move the cells to mating boxes or queenless colonies, so the queenless nuc does the job of both ‘starter’ and ‘finisher’.
If you really don’t want to graft, and only need up to 10 queens or so, you can add a frame containing eggs into the queenless nuc instead of the grafting frame. The bees will make multiple cells on the comb of open brood, and nine days after adding the frame, you can carefully take it out and cut out the cells that you require. It’s a perfectly good way to make a handful of queens. Make sure that the frame with eggs comes from your best colony so that you are propagating good traits.
Cell Building – Continual Production
A simple system uses the Paynes polystyrene nuc. You require the nucleus box, a transport screen/floor, a queen excluder, and a brood extension box (the upstairs box). You also need a strong colony, with a good queen, which lives inside the double-nuc. To get the nuc started off, it’s handy to use frames of sealed brood harvested from strong colonies as part of swarm prevention.
The transport screen/floor must be modified by stapling mesh across the space in the centre, above and below where the existing mesh is. This creates a deep buffer zone which the bees cannot cross – some call it a ‘double mesh board’. The existing single piece of mesh won’t work, as bees from above and below can come into contact with each other. I use stainless woven 12 mesh: 1.56 mm aperture.
Before grafting, the double-decker nucleus colony needs to be arranged so that there are plentiful nurse bees in the bottom box, and the queen is out of the way. The main steps are:
- Start with a strong double-brood nucleus colony.
- Place all open brood (eggs and larvae) below a queen excluder, with the queen above on sealed brood only.
- Leave for 48 hours; nurse bees migrate downward to tend the open brood.
- Replace the queen excluder with the double-screened board (modified transport screen).
- Leave a further 5–6 days. By this point, eggs present when the double-screened board was installed will have been drawn into an emergency cell if they are going to be. Remove every emergency cell thoroughly before grafting; a single missed cell will outcompete your grafts.
- Shake in extra nurse bees harvested from other colonies to create a high population density of young bees in the bottom box. Shaking super frames avoids risking accidentally adding another colony’s queen.
- Graft into the nurse-bee-rich lower box, which also has no queen pheromone reaching it from above. If the queen was below with the grafts above, her pheromones could rise through the mesh and discourage cell building.
- After 5 days, remove the grafts (now sealed cells) to a finisher colony or incubator and add more grafts to the bottom box.
- After a further 5 days, remove the second batch of grafts to a finisher colony or incubator, then remove the double-screened board, allowing the colony to revert to its double-brood nuc state.
- Two weeks later, you can repeat the whole thing again.
A few extras are needed to ensure success:
I would have a pollen frame downstairs, adjacent to the grafts, and some thin syrup in the frame feeder (bottom box). This ensures good nutrition throughout, whatever happens with the weather.
I’d make sure the upper entrance (created by the modified transport screen, which is now the floor for the upper box) points the opposite way to the entrance of the lower box. This means that the bees upstairs will move to the lower box as they return from foraging, bringing in fresh pollen and nectar, and creating a sense of over-crowding, which encourages cell building.
Although the queen is upstairs with few bees to keep her company, there is warmth coming through the mesh from below, and new bees are emerging from the sealed brood.
When I remove grafts to take them to the incubator, I always check the combs in the bottom box to make sure there are no rogue cells lurking. Or even an emerged cell, meaning that a virgin queen is on the loose. It can happen, if you miss a just-started emergency cell earlier on, but hopefully not often. In that situation, you have to find and remove the virgin queen. That’s not always easy, but a virgin queen will ruin your cells, so there’s no alternative.
The double-nuc cell builder will be a better cell builder if the ratio of nurse bees to older bees remains high. Over time, as nurse bees become foragers, the population ages, and also becomes so large that swarming could be on the cards. One solution is to move the double nuc to the other side of the apiary so that foragers are lost – they tend to find their way into other colonies near to where the double nuc originally sat.
And Finally
I know that for people who don’t want to do grafting this section might be a bit redundant, and that’s fine. You can let the bees make their own queen in the queenless splits that you make using the techniques described earlier in this article. The double-nuc cell builder, for you grafters out there, is a way to build cells in a queen-right setup, so that new brood and nurse bees are continually being created, and pollen is being brought in. You can easily produce 20 good cells each time you graft, and keep it going through the summer. For me, with the number of mating nucs I run, this is the right level. I’m making queens for me, not selling them, apart from in nucs for next season.
No excuses; you only need a nuc, and you don’t have to graft – so get making queens! The next bottleneck will be what to do with your sealed cells, but that’s another story.