NNY Bees - Very Simple Graft-free Queen Rearing Method

good morning it's May 5th 2017 this is Larry Mitchell with nny bees and I want to show you a very simple method of raising Queens I haven't done I haven't raised Queens myself so I'm kind of showing you how a beekeeper local beekeeper I'm buying some nooks from him this year he lives just a little ways down the road he's been keeping bees for 50 years and he has about 15 20 hives and he sells a number of nooks every year and sustains his own Avery a wonderful guy a very very helpful knowledgeable because I'm waiting for bees to come mine had died out over the winter I asked him if he could explain to me how he raised his Queens and it was it was so simple that I had to create a video so I didn't take a video of him create both going through the steps so I kind of tried to recreate that here with my high boxes I do have a little clip at the end that shows how the Queen cells have grown in and him showing us pests at high so I hope you enjoy I hope you learned something from it thanks a lot okay for this method of raising bees there is one piece of special equipment that you need to have nothing too complicated and I'll show you that in the video the construction of that this is the method that Luke used to to generate new queen cells basically let's assume you've got some comb and this comb is empty comb there's nothing in this comb it's empty let's just let me write a comb and you've got a queen that you really like and there are eggs in here and you can see so you can see a row of eggs roll of larvae this is a you know an area where the queen is just laid and you can see the eggs what do you would do is he using a pencil ordinary pencil use an eraser and it would find say this is the cell with the egg in it it would basically crush open the cells around it the walls just like that to expose the egg and that's kind of what it ended up looking like I don't know if you can see that at all okay would crush a spot and expose the egg and you knock all the walls down and leave the eggs in it and you find another spot somewhere else here say you would do the same thing you use a pencil an eraser it would just slowly push away to expose the egg kind of smash out the egg cells next to it to end it up again with another little pattern like that you can see that right in here right there so he did several of these and again it was just a he was just knocking down the cell walls and he would flatten them back and just leave that one open set and he was spacing them out and he did several of these and so from the pictures of the video that I took of his Queen cells this is what he did he started by finding a comb that he liked in a high where he liked the Queen he took out the thing brushed all the bees off it brought it to a different area and then he just worked quite simply like this and he would say okay here's an egg like and he would just slowly crush away the cells and use them pencil and just opened it up okay that was it that's all he did okay now from there well and pause but I'll show you some what he did next okay so what do you would do is he would take a high to raise the Queen rear the Queen's in and he would remove the Queen so a day before he had done this process of finding a hive and just depressing with the white with a pencil on the wax he's taken a high and he made it queenless remove the Queen and he put it in another box so now this box has no Queen in it okay and so these bees really want to raise a queen and then he did nothing more than take an empty frame and he set it down like this and then he took this comb and he took those eggs that he crushed and he flipped it over he placed it on top of this empty frame like that so they were facing down okay and then at that point he placed the feeder on top of here because he said it was very important to get a lot of make sure they were fed really well and he added another box to the top of that and added a whole bunch of burlap bag around it to keep it warm and keep the bees down inside so you have some heavy burlap material whatever material and he covered it up that way the bees once he did that he put a cover on top of it this way the bees could only get at at the sugar water and that exposed eggs and other bees couldn't come in and get at the sugar or or bother anything and he left it like that and you know it doesn't take very long that you had some nice queen cells growing out then at that point he just would take a knife once the Queen cells were mature and cut out big pattered so it wasn't crushing the cell and then moved that over into a another high body or a nuke with some other you know bees and brood and boom he's got another nuke started in another colony so but that was it thanks for watching okay so what I did is I constructed this special shim this gives me space to put that that frame and what I discovered is ya would make sense to somebody by trying to put this frame in here it won't fit because it because of the rest I mean obviously the whole point is that the frame is designed to fit on the edges the box is smaller so I can't place a frame down inside there in an empty frame so I need to have a shim and all I done is it is I've taken a box and three sides just rest on top of the box three sides rest onto the box so this this side just hates up here and that side made sometimes side mates up this other side is longer and so I left a little space there now I just added a board here I didn't really need to but I need the board to extend out and still enclose the box because I needs it to be long enough I'll show you here in a sec I just need to make a box that's long enough to allow me to get this edge of the frame and that ends your frame to fit inside here that's and that's pretty much it so all I did is that I made a board that's the full length here and then I put a piece of plywood on it and I just did this kind of for stiffness if any I probably didn't even need to do that so I basically had three sides of wood mine are probably three inches by three inches maybe even three and a half by three and a half our hallway around three and a half inch deep and that allows me to have space and so I'll show you this set up now okay let's assume that this is my comb it's got the the crushed down spots where I have eggs what I realized is that I needed the shim to put in here and the shim allows me to place a blank frame in here like we talked about and then with the egg cell site I can place that down over top of this and get that to fit in here without this not this shim I can't set this in here because it's too long so I had to I had to build a board that's just a little bit longer and basically my shim is nothing buddy a piece of a board but then I added a piece of plywood to the end I am sure that you wanted to it could take an old box and you could slice it you can take an old box and you could cut a space and then just tack another board on top there to keep this you know so it's a stole a box but that would give you that would give you enough space for the frames to pass down through there so you could take an old box and do that but I decided just to make one so again my shim sits on there next this is the colony of these without a queen I put my spacer in there which is just an empty frame or just spacers but basically I need to have room for the for the Queen cells to get drawn down this is my comb with the pattern I just made with a pencil I place it on top like that then I use the rest of the space to place feeders mason jar feeders but I don't know you could actually even drop a frame Peter in here whatever you want to do and then at that point you've taken a box puts another box on top of here this is the way Lucas done it he places another box on top and throws a bunch of burlap inside here puts an insulated cover on to keep everything one allows them to feed no other bees to get at the food and there's your there's your queen cells getting drawn out right down there and it's easy enough to check on them put it right there you can just lift them up see it take this box off you can lift them up carefully knock the bees off how they're doing and how they're drawing those out then when you're ready to use them you just cut around the opening big enough around the cell big enough so you don't have to handle the cell or touch the cell you don't want to crush the cell at all so that's that's pretty much how he does it he's gonna go up over t1 now I should get seems guys off yeah you clogging up one on this all over their cats uber couples green and I'll cut them up with a knife you know let me just laying down there over an empty brain right yep your paint bucket actually Peter yeah the building there is good morning in fact that in this little warm yep it's to keep things warm down here I got some clean sales this is just letting them build an actual tennis I really want to count how many I have so what did you say these were just tells it started on their own no all right I took that I made an Queen a hive Queen Levana and I damaged some sales too but it but there I think they're going to hang in straight then okay so you just damage the cells on the bottom cut some odd already it looks like Ivan got squashed there's one there okay got washed yeah I'd be any good there's two there one are there I get here okay so how did you damage the cells on these I just took pin broke down the back at the bottom alright they build them right there's another frame in here I think it has some in so there we go two three words of 10 down here 101 on the bottom I'm here and over there to hit for ya okay that's all you did here is just kind of messed up some of the cells yeah and I hadn't let them clean once I had what should I make I'm gonna have to do four five six seven eight I'm a date so far part of this batch and it has four more so I could make work on what I got I got that and then set my pi gonna handle like it doesn't because a Nuke switcher out of that patch

Channel: NNY Bees

Views: 55,987

Keywords: bees, honeybees, queen, queenrearing, graftless, no graft, graft less, graft-free, hopkins method, luke martin

Id: 9tBIS-8v-sg

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Sat May 20 2017