No Graft Honeybee Queen Rearing System DIY Easy!

hey there it's james with carp spees and we have some bad weather so we're under a tornado watch not warning until one in the morning and it looks sunny but there is a bunch of rain that's coming down and some storms moving through so what a great day to get in the garage and do some bee projects if it can't be out in the apiary so um i have a project that i put off for quite a while and i want to get to it and now is a perfect opportunity here it is memorial day so we have the day off of work and we have time to do it so several years ago i saw a video about a way to rear queens that did not involve grafting and at the time you know it seemed pretty interesting to me and i said someday i might do that so that combined with the fact that i actually need queens now a lot of people are asking me hey do you rear queens and i don't i do a lot of walk away splits and if there's extra queen cells in a hive i will try to save them so occasionally i have extra queens but it hasn't been a thing i've really focused in on so i don't want to do grafting i don't want to make a big investment in more equipment maybe i'll do that in the future i know other people do that and it does require quite a bit of skill and good eyesight to do grafting so this is a way to do queen rearing without grafting so if you're looking for a grafting video this isn't isn't for you so let me just describe the method that i remember hearing on the internet and i will give credit to whoever put the original youtube video together it's just been a few years so i gotta go dig it up i'll put it in the comment section so make sure you check that out in addition to this but let me describe the method so basically you're gonna have your standard 10 frame box i configure these at with 9 frames like some people do so but the point is is you're going to have a box it's going to be full of bees filled out frames but the trick is it's queenless so basically what you're doing is you're setting up a queen rearing box so again standard deep box to start with again all full of bees doing their thing then what you're going to do is you're going to get a couple frames so the trick here with these frames is the first one it really doesn't matter it can be empty it doesn't have to have anything actually it needs to be empty so you would take this frame and you would just set it here on top of your 10 or 9 frame configuration and this is going to be blank and empty just like it is and then you're going to take a frame that has comb only no foundation and it has eggs so what you're going to do is you're going to look through this comb that has eggs in it and basically what you're gonna you're gonna find the smallest tiniest newest eggs you can you're gonna take an eraser head on a pencil and you're gonna push the cell walls away from your selected egg and you can do several of those on a frame depending on the number of eggs that you have so once you push those all away and i'll show this later i'll splice in a little video of that this is essentially going to be your queen rearing frame again it needs to be foundationless it can't have foundation because you're going to have to cut out those eggs when they develop so basically again nice egg in there going gonna carefully push all the cell walls away create an indentation with an eraser on a pencil once you do that in a bunch of places on that frame you're gonna carefully take that frame you're gonna turn it upside down so remember this this one's empty there's nothing in it it's just sitting here you're gonna place this one on top of it and then what's gonna happen is the bees are gonna come up and they're gonna treat those because they're queenless right so they're looking to make queens but they're gonna pick those cells that are a little bit bigger and they should again according to this video that i watched create queen cells from those they may create create even more queen cells than what you did that for but that's the idea so again i'll show videos of what that actually looks like i just want to describe that procedure um before we get into the build here so so again you're going to have a frame like this a frame like that on top of it so so the first thing you realize is well this box doesn't quite work for that because you know again it's going to have all its regular frames in here so you need what you know a shim basically so you need another little thin box that's deep enough to hold a couple frames maybe plus one and that's also a little bit longer than than the normal box so that we can actually accommodate you know the holder of a normal deep frame again if you're doing mediums just adjust for mediums okay so what that's what we're going to create today so we're going to create a second little shallow box that's going to go on top of here it's going to have a slightly it's going to be slightly deeper than a normal box and then the other thing you want to do is in this extra space here this is an opportunity to feed this queen rearing box and that's really really important from everything i've read related to queen rearing is you need to give them feed so you can do that you know in a frame feeder if you want to do that you can set you know a jar or two in here of sugar water to feed them however you want to do it and then what you do once you have everything established is you cover this all with you know with some burlap or or something to keep everything really nice and tight and warm in here and that will help drive that clean rearing process well that's a theory anyway so that's what we're gonna attempt there's a lot of ways to do clean rearing this one just seemed the most interesting to me i don't know why because it really doesn't evolve other than the shim creating much new equipment this will be an experiment you know we'll test and learn here and see if it works if it's a bust it's a bus and i'll report those results so all right let's get into this one okay so how am i going to build this shim well some of you might know that the price of wood has gone up so i've become the king of using cedar pickets for a lot of things that i normally would buy regular wood you know planks of wood for or dimensional lumber for but uh i find that cedar works really well bees like cedar has been my experience and it's relatively inexpensive and pickets just seem to give me a lot of variety of sizes and stuff to work with so um i went ahead and picked a 5 8 thick piece of cedar so it's a little bit more than what i normally would get but for this i wanted something a little little nicer and these are actually let's see i think they're five and yeah five and five eighths of an inch deep and i think that'll be just just about perfect here for what we need so you know i imagine we'll have these two frames on here and then a little room here to cover you know lightly cover this with some burlap so to keep these frames warm while the queen rearing process is going on so again so i'm going to use some cedar pickets here for that and i've had these in a garage laying flat for quite a while so i'm pretty confident that they're dried out and that they're not going to warp too bad so that's the other thing with cedar you got to kind of keep an eye on but if you imagine here and i think that we're going to just you know the the depth here i'm sorry the width here is just fine uh it's the length that we're going to adjust so what we'll do is probably just build this out again enough so that you know these will just lay in here nicely let's uh let's let's give this a shot so we'll do some measurements here and go ahead and make some cuts and go from there so let's do our shortcuts first i know i think i'm breaking a rule there but i have plenty of wood so we should be okay all right first two cuts not too bad we'll see if these line up that'll do all right so these will be our end boards so again if these are like this we'll just set these up here for reference right and so now we know approximately how far out we need to take this so it's looking to me like we're going to take want to take this basically so this is on the outside so let me see if i can show you that over here over my shoulder [Music] yeah so basically what we want to do is have one box that overhangs the edge here just a bit actually like perfectly right there so that's okay so the long pieces will just have to go from here to that edge this actually makes measurement pretty easy because it's going to be exactly look at that so we're looking at 19 and three eighths just shy of 19 and three eights i think that'll work so we'll do some two cuts 19 and three eighths so here's what we got let's make sure that this works so again if we were to imagine this on here and buttered up nicely that we would have yeah so that would hang just over and again we know that that is going to fit right inside there very nice okay all right just a reminder wear safety equipment follow all safety rules sometimes that means not doing what i do all right so it looks like this will work now we got perfect all right [Music] [Music] do [Music] welcome to kansas again let's imagine we have a box full of frames and bees at the bottom here we put this spacer in sideways open frame and then we have this frame full of comb and eggs so imagine that that's full of comb and eggs and we would set that over there the worry is you know this one has some wire running through it but what if it doesn't and the comb sags so the thinking is why don't we just put you know a dowel in here that can provide a little support in case that comb sags so when you're putting this on you'd have to put the spacer on set this over it and go from there so thinking here is as far as a design as you would want let me even this up you'd want this frame flush to the wall and kept to the wall i believe or thereabouts so what we would do is we would you see i put a little couple notches there as we notch this out so that this actually goes down just a little bit on this frame um so it doesn't keep that egg frame up so high so all right let me show you where we're at so what we did is we went ahead and placed the dowels in here evenly spaced so this one's you know through the center these two are five inches apart and the other thing that i thought about was now that we have these bars here what we can do is we can use this space here to set feeder jars if we need to now if you're using a feeder you know in frame feed or a frame feeder you won't need that but what i could do is just you know glue a few little dowels across to your couple dowels across here and you can just set a bottle right on there and allow the bees to feed and again you want to feed pretty heavy when you're doing queen rearing so so right now what i did i don't know if you can see but there's some glue on here i just put some glue to kind of hold this in place we'll let that dry and then what we'll do is we'll nail these into place from the outside in so that'll take care of that piece of this and i think i could just go ahead and lift this off right now you see how easy that lifts off and we have the little cutouts here so that fits across this frame right here and then again we'll just demo this for the moment and i'm being careful because you know i don't want to jostle the glue too much that's just exactly what i'm doing so there we go so again imagine this is a frame you know full of eggs and wax no foundation you can just set this in here and let them build those eggs down they'll feed them do whatever they need to do because they're a queenless hive and put your feeders here maybe set another medium box on here or even a deep box pack it with whatever you need to keep it warm i'd recommend you know like coffee bags you know you can buy those at most pharma fleet type of places but just burlap or something to keep it nice and warm up here on top absorb any moisture and you know put your lid on i think you're good to go so 16 days from egg to queen so keep that in mind that is the key to clean rearing so you know we talk about the box and how to support this but you know you put those eggs in and then you're gonna have to come in probably day 14 day 15 lift this frame up see how the eggs are doing they're probably close to emerging so you just take your knife i would imagine and cut out the eggs that uh that you wanna or the cells that you wanna save put those into queenless hives or in another location uh so that you know she doesn't emerge and kill her sisters which is exactly what uh the queen would do so just keep an eye on that so we'll take more videos as we try this thing out but i think this shim is going to work really really nicely so there you have it [Music] got my safety gear on here so um i'll go ahead and let this dry do a little bit more video but uh for now this is james with make it happen greenhouse and cars bees thanks for watching okay while we're building our queen rearing box we're waiting for some stuff to dry some glue to dry i thought it'd be a good time to go ahead and show you how to stamp your wood if you have a stamp so first thing i would recommend is getting one of these types type of uh torches so i use the map pro here and this is getting pretty light this might run out midway through we'll see and then to light my smoker i don't use this i use this cooking torch and um essentially you just turn this on lights that up make sure you're doing this on the cement away from anything flammable tilt this too much it'll actually shut off it takes quite a while to heat up you can hold it if you're careful just kind of move around the surface of this get it real nice and hot what you're looking for is an iridescent color on the metal it does take a while [Music] let's give it a shot super hot remember so here we go looking for smoke little usually counts about 10. yeah see what it did hey hey look at give that another go all right that looks promising voila let's do a box you do gotta rock a little because sometimes the wood's a little warped nice especially if you want to get the [Music] on numbers knots are not helpful sometimes the wood around knots has sap and it doesn't stamp very well all right this is going great [Music] okay so we're gonna had a little debaco with the glue decided to stamp i should have waited for the glue to dry and i didn't and that caused everything to get out of whack so i'm gonna go ahead and actually drill these dowels in so we just have to re-measure everything this could be a complete mess i think we got it let's see if we have the same luck on the other side all right moment of truth i don't see anything split do you so imagine here that we are actually you know doing our queen rearing we got a bunch of bees in here we've set this thing on here we know we got to put our queen rearing box in here so we're going to carefully place it so that it holds that spacer frame in there things out which we've done take our lovely frame of eggs that we have already mashed down now those we would want those to be facing down so we'd go ahead and gently send this set this in here position it bees can come up and do what they need to do now we would want to put feeder some feed on so let's actually solve for that right now set this on here like this so we'll cut a hole here and here so we'll just be like this okay and for good measure you see there's just a little lift on that that's what happens so here's what we'll do to fix that so you see what we got here so now we got our feeder on here so i'm gonna gently try to pound these in with a brace underneath so these don't jostle too much and then we'll glue on the bottom and let that dry that should hold it in place how does that look pretty good fill that little hole would probably do it for us okay yeah so we'll let that dry and then um you know maybe i'll just put a little decoration or something on here besides the logo because it is a clean room box after all so you got to give it something special a little decoration just for fun all right once that all dries we'll stain these well the rain continues so we're back in the workshop and we're finishing up our queen rearing box and really the only thing to finish up with it is the staining so what better thing to do on a dreary rainy day we're hoping this investment of rain yields a whole bunch of plants that are going to just pop and the bees are going to get all over it so because we know we'll go into summer here in kansas and we may not see a drop of rain for quite a while so but hey uh i do all my boxes and there's one down there um with this gel stain so i just wanted to share that with you real quick i'll bring that up so it's this uh minwax gel stain and i have found that uh this works really well it's easy to apply it's a one step process takes a little longer to dry than paint um but once it's in there it seems to seal these boxes up pretty darn good so just as an example of that you know this is a brand new box that i'm just now letting dry but over here i'm creating a a trap out box and this is an older one and you can see i mean this has been in the field for you know a couple years and you know we got a little nick there it looks like but uh it's it's holding up pretty good so yeah so you know maybe once every three four years i'll pull these out of service and restain them sand them a bit clean them up whatever and hopefully they'll have a good long life before you gonna buy a new one so i'm gonna use that on this queen rearing box as well and we have some little decorations we put on there to make it fun but excited to try to make some queen cells with this no grafting technique so i'll get back to staying in here [Laughter] thanks

Channel: Make It Happen Greenhouse and Carp's Bees

Views: 3,937

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Id: iSqINQgmipc

Length: 30min 1sec (1801 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 01 2022