Queen Mating Yard

i had some requests from a few people to update on how our nuke mating yard did that would be the yard we put together in that video we did about a month ago on splitting we did fair i've done better and i've done worse we got an 87 percent take here the nuke boxes on the back of the truck represent the duds those were ones that were queenless or a laying worker we put this yard together about four and a half weeks ago and a few of them had already turned lane worker if they didn't have a laying queen usually we'd like to get back within three to three and a half weeks to check on nukes to avoid that but we just couldn't do it this time we've been getting uh some work done on some colonies that we're selling and we just finally got it done so we were able to get in and check all our nukes we just got our other two breeder queens from sue kobe so we're going to get those established today and hope to be grafting from them within 10 days so we'll come back into this yard and harvest all these queens and use these as queen matey nukes again that process is running about two weeks late for us too i'd hoped to already have harvested these queens and got in gotten in another group of cells but that's a beekeeper's life sometimes you're just running behind you got to do what you got to do so 87 is not terrible and well actually it's pretty decent but i always hope for a little more of course i'm happy another reason we like to harvest queens between three and four weeks is because we have a much better acceptance rate when we're introducing them we also have a much lower rate of super seizure actually it's much lower we also try to avoid banking queens for more than a few days if we can help it for the same reasons i know a lot of the large queen producers out there harvest queens on a 14-day cycle or in other words they catch queens from their mating nukes every 14 days and then they introduce another cell that will be harvested 14 days later queens harvested like that have barely begun to lay and that's only if the weather for mating was good and they got mated on time in my opinion producers harvesting queens on a two-week cycle are really doing their customers a great disservice all right let's check out and see what one of these nukes looks like [Music] okay so they've been here four and a half weeks and that's exactly what we would expect to see from one of our queens in four and a half weeks from the date we put the cell in you can see her pattern is real good in the center she already has a few hatching bees so this is definitely one of our cells that hatched and made it and did well let's see if we can find her and see what one of these caucasian queens looks like okay you can see she's got you can see she's got some hatching bees on this frame too so she's been laying eggs for a little while and there she is right there let me lay this down and get a hold of her okay so that's one of the daughters of those expensive breeder queens we were talking about caucasian queen actually this queen is 75 caucasian that's exactly what she is and her little blue dot so find her easy next time okay okay jesse has found a queen here that is not from one of our cells it's obviously italian the brood hasn't progressed that far so we know that she's a queen that this colony raised themselves and we're i'm just kill her jesse i don't want her we're not trying to introduce more italian blood into our outfit we're trying to make it caucasian we'll just disassemble that nuke and uh do away with it [Applause] as you can see here we don't pay much attention to creating nice perfect beautiful lines with our queen mating nukes a little bit of a change up an angle several feet apart i think that gives you better mating than have everything perfectly in a row [Applause] okay here's another one of our queen mating groups this one was established in late june i think it's been through a couple rounds of queens and we're here to check the latest one a big long row of nukes up through there i think currently we've got we'll see one two three four five different groups of queen mating nukes going we'll see how this one did okay seth this is a good learning moment you see how this comb is smashed up against this wall you can see the comb is real tight and that's a place where the beetles can get started you need to be able to space that from the wall so the bees can police that space if they can't police the area between the comb and the wall that's where the beetles can get started so squeeze your frames to the center and make sure the bees can police both balls and have a lot less beetle problems so john's just putting one hole in these lids it's just a two penny nail one hole we're not trying to draw a foundation we're just trying to keep them from starving just queen mating nukes this is a five pound honey jar a little less than half a gallon one to one syrup that'll hold them for a few weeks well that'll hold them for a couple weeks anyway yard wasn't as good as the first yard i haven't done the math i'm thinking we got about 75 percent here might be a little better it's getting late in the season too we don't have the drone population that we had to even just a month ago that might be a factor in all of this and we've got two more groups to check before we're all done checking nukes i only had about a 60 or 65 take in this yard i know the reason why i knew of the problem before i dropped them off here but i really didn't have a choice it was kind of a situation of convenience that day we had to put them here over the years i've always noticed a lower success rate when i put mating nukes close to established colonies it's just my casual observation i can't point to any researcher studies to back me up maybe there's too much confusion for the virgins coming in or maybe it's just a matter of the virgins be intimidated by all the bee traffic i really don't know shouldn't try to explain it because i i just don't know the answer all i do know for sure is that it does make a difference the other day i was talking to chris werner who produces a whole lot more queens than i do and keeps better notes than i do too he said his long-term average including good years and bad years good yards and bad yards is between 77 and 80 percent he said he can have trouble in yards that have high dragonfly populations i've heard that dragonflies can easily catch a virgin queen on their mating flight and you can see a lot of them around bodies of water swamps and things like that just like me chris says he has a high percentage take in some yards and maybe in the 90s mid 90s and occasionally even high 90s we all like to see that then there's times like this when it's only in the 60s and sometimes there's even no apparent reason you just don't know why i once asked a friend of mine who's the one of the largest queen producers in south georgia why he puts queens in packages in early to mid-march when he knew they weren't that great and he said because the customers demand it i didn't say this to him but i couldn't do that and it just goes to show you that the customer isn't always right i know some people will argue with me but that's too early for south georgia some years you will be fine but some you will not the mating temperatures are iffy at that time of year and the drones are still a bit young you kind of roll in the dice in my opinion it takes at least till late march and some years it even takes till the first of april to get the very best queens out of south georgia that's a mistake a lot of people make they push it too early and then they wonder why they have high super seizure numbers poor mating will do that and the best it's just best to wait an extra week or two and do it right the first time in my opinion steve tabor once told me that poor queens aren't always about the stock but sometimes it's just simply about the producer cutting corners anyway i'll get off that soapbox okay first off we're at a wood mill so forgive all the racket in the background but we ran across something that's a little educational seth found a double d colony with an excluder and at first he thought there was two queens one in the top and one in the bottom this excluder is barely bent right here and i mean barely but that's all it takes for a queen to squeeze through and go back and forth so that's why i'm very adamant with my employees not to throw these metal wire excluders around it just takes a little small bend like that to let a queen through anyway we don't have two queens we've actually got one she's just been going back and forth apparently and i think that's why right there thanks okay it's been one month since we pulled the nukes out of this yard so i i believe this is one of the colonies we worked in that uh how to split your bees video it's taken two buckets of real thin syrup uh we're putting 1 000 pounds of sugar and a tote tote holds uh 250 to 275 gallons so that's pretty thin syrup i just want to have a look at what they've done with that there has not been any honey flow it's been a dearth so all the foundation drawn in this colony has been on straight sugars for they're just starting to work on the last frame that frame's about two-thirds done that's uh pretty close to being done something i like to do when the bees are drying if they haven't done a front corner i'll reverse the frame like that and put that corner that's not finished towards the back of the box that encourages them to get it finished a little bit of brood on that one so they expanded their brood nest a little bit yeah this side's even better so they've come along on that four gallons of syrup that would have been the four frames we left there right there so the four frames that we were leaving behind are right here i got brewed all the way out on that and they've drawn that out pretty good i'm going to reverse it like i was talking about get that on finished corner back in the back anyway so that's what you can do with sugar syrup the whole yard has been handled this way they've all grown they've all done nicely we're going to fill this bucket today that'll be their third bucket of that real thin sugar syrup some of these behind me still have a little farther to go so they might get another bucket before the season is over it's uh let's see it's the 4th of september so they'll draw a foundation for another couple weeks by the time we get into late september they won't draw a foundation no matter what you do so anything we want to get accomplished has to be done in the next two or three weeks and then it's really just shutting it down for winter he'll be ready though i'm happy with what i'm seeing here it's good okay john's looking at this one this is we saw this is a red flag open the lid and you don't see a lot of bees first thing we wonder is why what's the reason is it the queen is it queen less we just don't know so this is one of those callings we really need to take a closer look at and see what's going on john let's go right to the center of the brood let's see if there is brood let's see what's happening so the next question is why are they small there could be several reasons one thing we might look at is to see if there's any hatched queen cells in there maybe they superseded or swarmed or i i don't know but uh john let's look at another frame and make sure that that queen is doing a good job on more than one frame okay is that full of eggs and larva uh yes sir yep yeah they look healthy i don't see a problem it's just what's on this one right here yeah i the pattern doesn't look bad john but i think that's one of those queens we need to replace that's really not good enough you

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Views: 13,513

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Keywords: queen mating yard, bob binnie queen rearing, queen rearing, queen mating nuc, mating nucs beehive, Bob binnie bees, queen acceptance, queen introduction, queen supersedure, queen production, bob binnie bees, bob binnie blue ridge honey, Bob binnie blue ridge honey company

Id: NKdl62yuqVU

Length: 17min 10sec (1030 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 06 2020