How We Produce Queens

[Music] the idea of making your own queen cells can be a little bit intimidating for new beekeepers i know it took me years to warm up to the idea i was afraid i wouldn't be able to stay on schedule keeping a tight schedule is very important when you're making and i was a little intimidated by the idea grafting once i got started with it it really didn't turn out to be quite as bad as i thought it would be i learned the process that we use from a friend of mine chris werner he runs indian summer honey farm and he's a superb queen producer i spent about three or four days with him long time ago and he showed me his whole process from beginning to end how they set up their timing boxes for their breeder queens and how they graft and how they set up their cell builders at first i didn't think i'd bother making a video on producing queen cells because there's so many out there already but somebody pointed out to me that our process is much different than most of those processes that you'll see out there and i thought because of that maybe people would find it interesting as we go through this video i'm going to thro try to throw in a lot of little tidbits some information that you might not pick up in a normal queen cell production video so hopefully that'll make it interesting too this isn't going to be a five minute video this whole thing takes time it's a two week process from beginning to end today's a friday and we're going to set up these timing boxes with these expensive breeder queens in them and by the way if you're interested in our breeder queens you can see more about them on our video introducing caucasian bees into our apiary anyway i'm going to go through it day by day step by step and today we're going to start with the process of putting in a polished frame in these cell builders for the queen to lay on that four days from now will be our drafting frame so we'll get started with that process so to start off with we're going to use just a little smoke on these breeder queens people need to understand that excessive smoke can make bees attack their own queen gets them all riled up we call it balling the queen and we just want to be very careful with these breeder queens they're valuable we want to create as little disturbance as possible through this process a little bit of smoke at the entrance it's a nice day sometimes we don't use any smoke at all you'll also see that these colonies that these breeder queens are in are not very large and i'm going to talk more about that at the end of the video so the first step is just to find the breeder queen we put in a frame of foundation on the edge to make it uh easy to get into the box she's got a big blue fluorescent uh tag glued on her back so she shouldn't be hard to spot and i'm not going to set these frames on the ground i'm going to hand them to john so that even if i miss her she there's no chance of her climbing off that frame we're always on the lookout for super seizure cells with these breeder queens artificially inseminated queens tend to get superseded more than a normal open mated queen now there she is you can see she stands out quite well i'm going to hand this frame to john and he's going to keep his eye on that queen while i uh work this box over this these grooves are for pieces of queen excluder that we're going to put in the box we want to isolate this queen on one frame so she'll be forced to lay on only that frame and then four days later that'll be our grafting frame we'll know we have larva that are one day older less so this is the frame we're going to use for her to lay on john let's see her just bring the frame over i'm going to ever so gently just place her right on that frame get her to go down there and she went down beside the frame so we got a good flat lid here that's going to force her to remain on that frame four days from now we know that all the eggs she lays today will be one day old larva and uh that way there's no mistake in the age of the larva on the crafting day okay first one done i'll do the other tommy's going to go through the top box i'm going to go through the bottom we're just going to set this honey super aside for the moment until we know where the queen is and once we find her we'll put her in this five frame nuke box over here just get her out of the way where we know where she's at while we do all the manipulations we want once we know where she's at we're just going to set this honey super on to another colony i've got eggs so this queen is in my box now that we have the queen isolated we can go to work setting up this colony as a cell starter we're going to make the bottom half queenless we're going to make sure that there aren't any eggs or young larvae in there and tomorrow that's going to be where our grafted cells go you'll see as we manipulate this thing where we put a frame of pollen which will be right next to our grafted cells that's very important and we'll put a inside feeder which we will fill with sugar syrup we want this colony to be highly stimulated and we'll get the very best results with that we'll also give them a couple empty empty drawn combs so they'll have a place to store some of the syrup and honey coming in so they don't plug out so badly that they want to put webbing in between our queen cells and we're going to try to put at least 10 or 11 frames of bees in it and overcrowding a starter is the way to get the very best results another very important thing and actually more important than overcrowding is the quantity of nurse bees that are in the unit it takes at least 200 nurse bees to do a good job on each queen cell so we're going to put 48 queen cells in this thing so let's use the number 50 for easy math 50 times 200 is 10 000 bees 10 000 bees is about uh that's approximately what a three pound package will hold which will cover about five or six frames deep frames we're going to put 10 to 12 frames of bees we're going to stuff them in this thing and that should guarantee that we have enough nurse bees to tend to our 48 cells it's also going to give us that overcrowded condition that's so important for good cell building so the first thing we're going to do is go through this colony and look for any frames that have eggs or larvae on it even though we're looking so closely for eggs every once in a while you can miss a couple so later in the process a few days from now we will be rechecking these frames to make sure they haven't started any queen cells on any frames besides our grafted cells this frame has a little bit of hatching brood on it but no eggs and no larvae and it's loaded with pollen so this would be a good choice for our pollen frame to go right next to our the next thing i'm going to put this inside feeder in [Music] next comes our frame of pollen this is hatching brood so it's a good frame to put inside the cell starter something else we want in here is we actually want to find one frame of open larva to give the nurse bee something to work on until tomorrow when we put our drafted cell in a lot of people don't do that this frame ah this frame has some eggs an open larva on it so it's going to be our dummy frame until tomorrow i guess you call it a dummy frame so i'm going to put a b on that for brood and it will come out of there tomorrow okay pollen open brood another frame with hatching bees and pollen and then the rest is just going to be frames of nectar maybe one or two open ones so they have a place to store nectar and syrup coming in so that's essentially our cell starter right there and we're going to shake in a whole lot of beans here before we start shaking in bees we're going to fill that feeder with thin sugar syrup we put this little landing board on here for shaking bees into the colony a sheet this is actually an old t-shirt but a piece of sheet or anything that the bees can walk on it will work it's just a thin piece of plywood under it piece of t-shirt works pretty good we start by shaking some inside and the rest are going to go on this landing board we're going to end up leaving the queen in the second story box she's actually going to be over a double screen divider board with the entrance facing backwards and we're only going to leave her with a few frames of bees even though she'll have maybe six or eight frames of brood the heat rising from the colony below will help keep that upper story warm so she won't need as many bees as she normally would you can see what happens here the bees that you dump on that landing board they just walk right on in it's a lot better than dumping them on top and trying to squish them all in tommy's going to set up that second story with the queen and get it ready he's going to put it over the double screen board and i'm going to go into another colony and find the queen and shake even more bees on this thing we want to get 10 or 12 frames of bees in this colony that only has eight frames in it now he's going to put the box with the queen in it back on top we'll shake a couple more frames in there and we'll be done with that unit for today we'll move on to the next all the nurse fees that have never been out of their own colony are going to stay there of course all the field bees that have been out and know their way home will return this 14-foot trailer is what we call our grafting shack we've always tried to stay mobile because we never knew where we were going to be trying to set up cell builders when we used to take our bees down to south georgia for the winter we'd take this trailer down there so we could craft and get started making sales early it's pretty simple it's just a 14 foot enclosed trailer we'll take a look at it we put a uh pot of hot water on a little propane stove to keep it hot and humid in here and it does the trick jesse and tommy are putting jzbz queen cell cups on rails right now you can get these things in multiple colors like if you want to keep track of a different day or a different breeder you can have a different color cup that helps we put 16 of these things on one rail they have a little nipple on the bottom that just fits into the slice or the groove on the frame rail each frame holds three of these bars there's 16 cups on each bar there's a picture of the frame right there and that gives each cell starter 48 cells to work on so if everything went well that frame will be full of very young larva because we placed the breeder queen on it four days ago and there she is with that big fluorescent blue dot so jessie's taking the excluder pieces out now we don't need those anymore we're just gonna turn her loose in the colony again and tommy is going to ever so gently pick her up and place her on one of the other frames and she's done her job until next week we'll do it all over again okay when you're brushing the bees off in a situation like this you want to use a real bee brush not a brush made with animal hair it's it's it's it's important that you're using synthetic bristle brushes because animal hair can really kind of make the bees mad so they just cover the frames when they're not using them with a warm moist rag to keep the humidity up in his book uh breeding super bees steve tabor states that he believes 95 percent humidity on the larva is probably the best he even says it's more important than temperature 70 degrees and 95 percent humidity is a lot better than 95 degrees and 70 percent humidity you got to keep these things moist i wanted to show a close-up of this grafting tool this is what a lot of people use these days you can see the spring action i can get close to this focus yeah when you get the larva on the end of the tip the little spring action just pushes it off into the cell i think that's why people prefer them in the old days before these tools were available people used it just about anything as a grafting tool i've heard of people using pieces of coat wire that were smashed with a hammer you can buy specialty tools that purchased in the catalogs that look like dental tools some of the guys 100 years ago were just simply using toothpicks anyway this is called the giant chinese grafting tool the ones we get from mann lake are the better than the ones we get from date and i don't know if somebody got a good bath or batch or a bad batch but we prefer the ones that come from man lake and tommy simply just uses uh reading glasses that he got from walmart what what power 125 or something or three power 303 power okay i'll shut up i won't say any more about that and then head lamps a head lamp yeah yeah and that works uh when i when i get my grafting tool um the first thing i do is i stick it in the hot uh hot water to make it pliable at the end so that it's easy it'll go underneath the larva and lift it and so it doesn't take much it just takes a little dip there and it makes that really pliable [Music] and go in try to lift it you don't want to flip them and you lay it into the cup okay i'm going to go get my close-up lens see if we can get a shot of that larva on there i'll be back that's what it looks like on the end it is not very big that little c shape there okay all the grafting is done they're inserting the bars into the frames okay next phase is to get these grafted cells into a cell starter that thing is stuffed full of bees which is what you want tommy's going to take out that frame of open brood that we left in there yesterday we'll take the bees off of that frame shake them in and that frame will go upstairs with the queen that's why we left only nine frames in that box yesterday they're still feeding the feeder from yesterday if there wasn't a honey flow going on we'd probably top that feeder off and make sure it was good and full gorged bees overcrowded bees with lots of young nurse bees makes your best sales starter so in two days we'll be back to reverse these boxes we'll put the queen on the bottom with a queen excluder and we'll put that bottom box on the top and it will then become a queen right cell finisher right now that bottom box is a cell starter so i brought the b brush along i normally don't mess with the cells when they're brand new and just started but just for the sake of this video we're gonna uh brush a few bees off and see how the cells look when they're just two days old we'll take a look in here and make sure the queen's doing okay should be shouldn't be a problem yeah everything looks happy up here this is what i like to see lots of extra bees hanging out on the underside of this double screen board we have this uh three quarter inch rim around this board just to help contain those bees normally our double screen boards don't have that rim but we have special boards just for this cell building process for all the extra bees lots of bees looks good oh yeah this looks really good looks like we got lots of cells started here it's not a 100 take but it's pretty good these are a little excited and it looks like it's going to rain any minute so i'm trying to hurry up get through this oh yeah okay so the queen's on the bottom put a queen excluder on put the cells up above this thing just got changed from a cell starter to a self queen right cell finisher and if everything goes right we'll come back uh next week and these cells will be all sealed and we'll be able to harvest them if we didn't have a honey flow going on i would probably refill this feeder just to make sure that they had all the nourishment they needed to get those cells built properly but we still have this honey flow going on so i'm not going to bother feeding them today the sugar syrup that we normally feed them is one to one sucrose we make our own it works really well for building cells and it's starting to rain so i'm gonna put this thing back together and turn the camera off okay that looks pretty good brush the bees off and get a count on that how many are we missing there one two three three three out of forty eight that's not bad every once in a while we'll get a hundred percent take and of course we're real pleased when that happens but this is more typical kind of like a 90 take or sometimes it goes real good sometimes it's poor for reasons we don't understand but generally we can count on what we do is we bank on 75 percent um when we're figuring out what we have to do we'll make an extra 25 percent we almost invariably have extra cells and then we have to decide whether we want to throw them away give them away or make more nukes usually we just make more nukes and get them used up okay tommy's been loading up our little wooden rails with the queen cell protectors we don't always use these but in some instances we do we purchase them bulk by the bag and we do try to recycle them you can use them over and over and over as long as they don't get lost or messed up so tommy uses his head lamp to what we call candle these cells oddly enough even though they look perfect occasionally there'll be a cell that actually doesn't hatch and so we actually have a look at them before we take them out into the field see so explain what you're looking for i look right in this gray cup for a larvae and you can see that i hope the camera can pick it up i don't think it can but you can explain it all of these have in them so that's good okay tommy is putting these cells in our blocks with cell protectors when a colony kills a cell they always go in from the side and to put a hole in the side and tear it down with these cell protectors they can't do that the cell will emerge in these the virgin will slip through the bottom just as if she was coming out her own cell and it ensures that she hatches now whether they accept the virgin or not is a different matter but we definitely know that the cell will hatch and emerge with these cell protectors you can see they have little spikes in the side that makes it easier to stick it in a comb and have it stick this is the control panel for our little incubator we don't have a big fancy incubator like some of the big queen breeders use we use these egg incubators we have four or five of them and each one will hold about 200 cells so makes it easy to put it on the back seat of the truck and take it out to the bee yard this one i will put a link in the description of this video where you can get this particular incubator anyway you can see the temperature we've got it set up and see what the humidity is that's all good and have jesse open it up so we can look at the inside each bar holds 20 cells that's what we carry out into the field with us we keep the incubator in the back of the truck keep it warm of course these days it's so hot that that's not an issue but we have an inverter in the truck that we plug in and convert to 110 current and plug these incubators in and carry them around in the back of the truck of course treat them very carefully usually put them in somebody's lap so they can kind of cushion any vibration from the road we like to put our queen mating nukes up against a tree line or a brush line anything they can use as an orientation sticks on the ground bricks rocks anything that they can sight in on we have a better success rate when we do that when we just put them out in an open field like that in the center it seems like our take is just a little lower this is a perfect example of why we use cell protectors these nukes were just made they were just brought in dropped down 15 minutes ago they probably don't even know they're queenless yet and in order to make sure they don't tear ourselves down we want to install it with a cell protector these nukes are meant to be queen mating nukes for us and we'll be running them the rest of the summer we like to put the cell on the perimeter of the brood that's where those little spikes on the cell protector come in good it really holds them on the comb again these aren't real large nukes just two frames with the little brood on each frame and it's just as simple as that i think i've got enough footage to put this video together and publish it but i just wanted to do one more thing jesse and tommy did several other cell builders and they actually put 64 cells in them they thought the bees were plenty strong enough to handle it and we did want some extra cells this week so i'm going to check on a couple of them and see what the take was we normally do put 48 in of 64 is a rarity for us but uh this time we did it and we'll see how it turns out several of these have 64 cells in them foreign feeder's empty so they used all the feed as you can see we have two bars in this one side by side i think they put two rails on each bar that would give us a total of 64. this first bar looks pretty good now it's a saturday today and they just grafted these on tuesday so this being the sixth day from an egg they should be just being sealed today i'll be very careful with them they're still a little delicate pretty good take looks like they're all sealed well there's a couple that aren't sealed yet there's one that's not sealed yet not sealed so these these cells would be five days from drafting looks like we're missing one two three missing three on this one so that'd be three missing from thirty two there's a couple that aren't sealed yet and this one's missing one two out of 32 so 5 out of 32 let's see 5 out of 64 is not bad that's a good take i would consider that a good take these cells still have a lot of royal jelly in the top i can see it and just full of royal jelly up at the top and that's what you'd want to see and expect to see with good cells at this time so this cell builder is going to get used again on tuesday we're going to put these cells in an incubator and manipulate this colony just like you saw earlier in the video and have them do it again if you got a good colony that's in good condition you can do it over and over and over occasionally you might have to have to give them a little extra boosting from another colony to keep them in good shape we have a bee yard that's about a quarter mile from here and if we feel like we need extra bees we will take some three pound packages down there and shake nurse bees into those three pound packages and bring them back here and shake them in of course the field force will go back home because it's just a quarter mile away that's one way of continuously using one colony over and over and over and some colonies are actually good enough on their own where they don't need any help anyway i'm happy with what i see here we'll be back here to re-manipulate this on monday turn it into a queenless cell starter with the queen on top and then graft again into it on tuesday i don't see any just from what i see here i don't see any reason why it won't do it again all right that's good this is something that anybody with a few colonies can do it only takes as you can see it only takes one colony to really make a batch of cells if you don't have extra bees to shake in their colony is not that strong you don't have to make 48 cells you can make 10 or 20 or 30. it really comes down to that ratio of nurse bees to the cells being constructed anybody can do it i would recommend for people that feel intimidated by the process just do it there might be a failure or two but that's okay um steve tabor who you you've seen me uh quote a few times in this video is actually a friend of mine and he said the most important part of building cells is to create the right environment he said having the right conditions was just as important maybe even more so than having the proper breeder queen so the information's here in the video read whatever books you can get your hands on create the right environment and you can be successful even the grafting at first seems a little intimidating but just go for it just do it skill will come with time skill comes with practice it's very satisfying to create your own cells it's a lot of fun and i highly recommend it you

Channel: Bob Binnie

Views: 156,508

Rating: 4.9102516 out of 5

Keywords: bob binnie queen rearing, bob binnie bees, blue ridge honey company, queen rearing cell builder, Bob binnie blue ridge honey, queenright cell builder, queen rearing incubator temperature, queen rearing step by step, queen rearing methods, queen rearing incubator, queen rearing grafting, queen rearing beekeeping, queen rearing nuc, queen rearing cloake board, queen rearing frame, queen rearing calender, cell starter, queen rearing, queen rearing grafting tools

Id: c28O916sy48

Length: 39min 43sec (2383 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 25 2020