Queen Rearing in the Sustainable Apiary

so this morning I talked about using nucleus colonies to maintain your apiary to make your apiary sustainable so that you don't have to go abroad or anywhere else to buy your bees and you can raise your own stock from your own stock well raising the nucleus colonies is only part one of the deal and the second part is raising the queen bees that go with it now this is an odd way to start a program this is the governor of Vermont the former governor of Vermont may say because he passed away in August of 1991 and why would I put this picture here well have you ever had something happen in your life and you can recount the day that it happened because of something that happened else that happened that day well on August 14th 91 they found our governor dead in a swimming pool and that's an odd way to start a program but that day I was on my way to the Vermont beekeepers meeting the summer meeting and they announced it on the radio and that's how I have a link to what happened next one of our most famous beekeepers known around the world for his a petheram and for his beekeeping wisdom and for his little inventions with Charles Mraz at that meeting I sat with Charles Mraz and he was um he was a mentor of mine as a young beekeeper he was almost a god this guy was he was amazing amazing beekeeper and a good friend and at lunch time he broke out his bucket of blueberries and his bottle of cream and a bowl and a spoon and he gave me blueberries and cream to eat for lunch what more could a young beekeeper ask than the most predominant beekeeper in North America giving him blueberries and cream so after lunch I really had to leave because I had bought a hundred queen bees and they were home sitting on my table in my dining room and I had to deal with 100 queen bees and he looks at me with a funniest look and he says to me why why do you have a hundred queen bee sitting on your table that you bought from some faraway place I thought about that day and that question for many years before I could answer it and this is sort of an answer to that question that's what it's all about that's what Charlie was trying to tell me why would I go buy bees from a faraway place when I can raise a bee like this that's better than anything I can buy so I have to ask you the same question are you buying queen bees from faraway places to put in your beehives why why are you doing this Queen bees are not difficult to raise we can raise better Queen bees than we can buy from faraway places so how do we do that well we follow what the bees do we watch how the bees raise their own Queens so when do the bees raise their own Queens well there's three instances and when when when honey bees will raise a new queen the first being emergency if the Queen was to disappear from the colony the bees would raise a new queen under the emergency response they'd float a larva a female larva out of a worker cell make a little queen cell out of it now they look like they're stumpy little cells you can see them on there but actually part of that cell is up inside the original worker cell so they're really not as long as as as a swarm cell or a stew procedure so some say some would say that this is not the best best Queen there we go some would say this is not the best way to raise queen bees and I would have to agree some would say that the bees don't know what they're doing and they might mistakenly use a larva that's too old and if they used a larva that was too old it would make an inferior queen so maybe the Queen that was raised from a 12 hour old larva or a one hour old larva wouldn't be as good would be better than a queen race from a two-day-old larva yes I would agree with that Charlie Mraz who raised and the family continues to raise all their bees by the emergency method would have my scalp if I ever said something like this but I believe it's true but that's one way the second way that these raise their Queens is by the SU procedure method they have a queen they know is something wrong with that Queen and so they go to work and they raise a new queen in this case the Queen lays the egg in a queen cup and the bees start from the egg with the intention of making a queen supplying that queen with as much royal jelly as it needs to make a better queen for their colony one of the problems with this is they only make a few so if we were to try to raise queen bees with a super seizure response what would we do how could we get the Queens the bees to supersede their queen when we wanted them when we wanted the Queens we could do something to the queen for instance we could clip an antenna off the Queen that would surely make the bees supersede their queen but we will only get a few Queens so it's really not a good way for us as beekeepers to try to raise any number of Queens the third way that bees raise Queens is by the swarm impulse these are these again are Queens raised when an egg is laid in a queen cup and the bees raise that larva with the intention from the beginning of making a queen this is probably the best way to raise Queens because you get more cells the colony is well stocked with nurse bees and the nutrition coming in from the field is at its best and so swarm Queens are probably the best way to raise queen bees inter and to get the best the quality Queen that you want we could use other ways this is a piece berkel that was in a in a colony where the combs were too far apart and they built it out and they put queen cells along the edges and you could clip these Queens from that piece of comb and use them those are probably swarm cells so there's a number of ways that we can get get Queens but as a commercial queen breeder I can't raise enough queen cells this way and I can't depend on these ways to raise my queen cells so I have to go about it in a different way so we want to talk about how we go from egg to a larva to a pupa and to the final product where the Queen has emerged in our nucleus colony raising queen bees is all about the jelly it's all about maximizing the number of nurse bees in a colony to maximize the amount of jelly that's fed to the Queen to the larva well enter the beekeeper into the situation how can we imitate what the bees do because beekeeping successful beekeeping is about observation watching what the bees do and then imitating follow their lead do what they do use their use what they do anyway to our advantage so you want to raise some queen cells you probably ought to have a book you probably ought to read a book this is a pretty good book printed in the States by dr. Laidlaw and dr. page and it highlights all the different ways that you can raise queen bees all the different methods and there's many many different methods to raise queen bees but by the time you finish reading this book you'll be more confused than you were before because you really don't know which one should I do which one is best for me the most common method used in the States nowadays is the swarm box starter queen right finisher so you harvest nurse bees from production colonies with in the mating within the cell building apiary and you dump them in a nuke with a special screen on the bottom a box that will hold many pounds several pounds of nurse bees and you put this in a cool dark place for 24 hours and then after that you put the graft in the queenless starter and these are all nurse bees that have now lost their queen and they're going to raise queens by the emergency response you put the graft in the in the cell builder for 24 to 36 hours they start raising the cells then you transfer the cells into a separate colony called the finisher and this is a queen right colony with brood above and excluder where you put the graft and if you if you elevate larvae above and excluder you're separating it from the queen they feel queenless and they raise queen cells that's a viable way to raise Queen cells but this method uses up the resources in your apiary so if you had a small apiary and you wanted to raise a number of Queen cells is it really viable is it sustainable to harvest nurse bees from your production colonies to raise queen bees to put in your production colonies I don't think so I think it's using up the resources of your production colonies so I don't believe that that's sustainable beekeeping in most of our situation if I if I wanted to raise a yard of Queen cells and I made a hundred pound average from the honey from the crop the production colonies if I raised a hundred pounds of honey and I get $2 a pound in bulk and there's 30 colonies there that's some significant money so I'd better raise some awful lot of Queens and awful good Queens and sell an awful lot of Queens to make up for the loss of production is that worth it well when I read this book it was so obvious to me that brother Adams method was the method I wanted to use to raise my queen cells I can't speak to the issue between the black bee and the buckfast bee or anything else about that but I think that that he had it right when he raised his queen cells with this method because he combined to two of the three methods that bees use he used the combination of the emergency response and the swarming impulse to raise his queen cells I call it the brother atom 10 / 10 plan or 10 + 10 plan where he would take a strong colony of bees with 9 to 12 frames of brood and he would go to a production yard and harvest frames of emerging brood harvest a brood box of emerging brood and bees take it back to the cell builder and install it above the Queen excluder above a very strong colony what happens when you do something like that if you took the strongest colony in your apiary and you gave it ten additional frames of brood what do you think would happen the colony would swarm wouldn't it it would get so strong it would be so full of nurse bees that it would probably swarm it would start Queen cells this is exactly what you want you're setting up your cell builder with a huge amount of set of nurse bees at a time when pollen and nectar resources coming in for the field are at their best and the weather is at their best you're raising your queen cells at the same time that the bees would raise their queen cells this is the key don't raise your queen cells when bees won't raise their queen cells because you're fighting you're working against the bees instead of working with the bees when I say a strong colony I mean a colony that big that has bees from the top of the hive right down through a slatted rack to the bottom board full of bees overflowing with these so let me go through the cycle a little bit this is a colony you see the bottom three boxes are the brood chamber this is my brood chamber - deep sand a medium depths / that's the overwintered configuration for me late in April early May about maple bloom I add to supers to that hive then in early and then about early to mid-may I set it up as a sell builder I elevate one of the partially filled honey supers above that queen excluder and I add that box of brood that I harvested from colonies and that's the original day one set up when that brood emerges this colony is going to be packed with young nurse bees well where does the brood come from does it come from your the rest of your colonies in your apiary well then what's the difference between that and shaking nurse bees out of your additional colonies in your apiary it still weakens uses up the resources of those production colonies is that sustainable beekeeping if your apiary isn't large enough to support it no it's not sustainable beekeeping well think about this in 2011 from 50 overwintered nucleus colonies that I that I maintained I did not sell them or use them for increase I built them up into three stories that would be 12 combs that would be four combs / four combs / four combs so between May 9th and June 19th of that year I set up 35 cell builders that was a total of 245 frames of brood I use two two combs of honey on the outsides and seven columns of emerging brood between them times 35 is 245 combs of brood when I finished setting up my last cell builder on June 19th I converted over to using the harvested brood to make nucleus colonies and between June 16th and July 20th I made on a 330 nucleus colonies so from 50 overwintered nucleus colonies in a 4 comb over 4 comb configuration I harvested over 900 frames of brood the prolific nosov our bees is unbelievable if you have the right flow and you have combs to add to the to the brood factories I call these little brood factories it's amazing what they'll do and they'll provide you all the brood you need for your for your cell building work and for you nuke work now does it become sustainable you're not touching your production hives all you're using is nucleus colonies nucleus colonies made from a little bit of brood in bees last summer overwintered built up until the flow starts and then instead of making them be production hives you let them be brood factories and it gives you all the brood you need for your work so nucleus colonies in a queen rearing program this is what I'm talking about these are overwintered nucleus colonies each of those stocks has two nucleus colonies in it with a divider between them and a four frame super on top of each one so each each side of that box has a nucleus colony with four columns in the bottom and four columns in the top before I start harvesting brood in order to gut let them populate all the columns I need I add a third box of four columns above the original then I start breaking them down so about early to mid May I start breaking them down pulling combs of brood out of them putting them in a shaker box which is a box a body with a queen excluder on the bottom as a holding box when I when I get my seven columns of brood pulled out a merging brute pulled out of the nooks so I'll go from the first nook and I'll take one or two combs approved from that Newt whatever it can give me without depleting its population enough to make its Windell but taking enough away from it so it won't swarm so it may be one comb it may be two combs perhaps the first time you go through that nuke it's one I have a hundred of these now and I set up four cell builders every four days so the first day I'll go to the nucleus colonies and I'll pull out what I need and when I have my enough brood in bees for my four cell builders I'll stop four days later I'll start where I left off and I'll continue through the apiary pulling frames of brood and bees and when I get my enough for my four cell builders I'll stop and then four days later I'll repeat the process and eventually I've gone through all hundred nucleus colonies and I'm back to the beginning again and by that time they've reestablished they've relayed in that she's relayed those columns that I put in there now brood again there's more emerging brood in those nooks I'll go through the nooks I'll pull out what I can pull out and move on to the next and so on and so on and so on so what about what happens when we take a strong colony of bees and we put a box of brood on top we create a monster an absolute monster so ten days after we graft er we set up this cell builder it's it's grafting day I changed this a little bit I used to look the day before grafting day for Queen cells because you cannot have Queen cells in a Cell builder you cannot have cell cells in a Cell builder because that cell will emerge before your cells and it will kill every cell you have so I used to do it the day before but that meant I had to take that colony apart twice so now I've changed it to grafting day so grafting day is ten days after you set up the cell builder you have to look for Queen cells above the Queen excluder there there could be no emergency cells because remember I said when you when you elevate brood above a queen excluder away from the core of the brood away from the Queen the bees response is to grow a new queen because they think their queenless so you go through the box that was all brood and is now emerging and you look for Queen cells and you have to remove every one every one then you go through the bottom of the box below the Queen excluder and there may be swarm cells there most likely they are because you've created this monster colony on a honey Flo full of nurse bees and they start swarm cells so you have to go through the colony shaking the bees off of each column making sure that there are no Queen cells in that colony on the day you graft let me say it one more time or two more times or ten more times you cannot have a queen cell in a Cell builder when you set it up it's the most common mistake that people make in setting up a Cell builder I do it everybody does it if you miss one you're going to lose your cells you have to get every Queen cell out of that cell builder should I say it again you need breathing stock how do you choose your breathing stock you can buy your breeding stock but you probably have breeding stock in your own apiary or in your friends apiary or in your associations apiary you use what you have your stock may not be the best stock in the world but you use what you have it's not always the best stock it's not always the best genetics that make good Queens this morning the speaker was talking about nature and nurture raising Queens is about nature and nurture professor Farrar in Wisconsin once said that you can raise better Queens from less than ideal stock under ideal conditions then you can raise from ideal stock under less than ideal conditions that makes sense to me so you use what you have you learn how to raise quality queen cells but if you wanted to select better stock you have to have criteria you have to have selection criteria you have to have things that you select for what do you select for here's a list of five things that you could select for how about the ability to winter the ability to winter in my area where we have snow we have cold - 20 F - 25 F all the time in the winter we have the last cleansing flight occurs in December and the next cleansing flight might not occur until April this this past spring our first cleansing flight was on April 1st since December our first pollen never came in until April 15th imagine people here are talking about pollen on Boxing Day people are here are talking about pollen in January but brood rearing in February Queen cells emerging in March this is unfathomable to me but here's five good selection criteria the ability to winter if they don't winter there's no snus and selecting for anything else because they're all dead so that has to be number one in my book diseases the absence of diseases and I and I specifically zero in on choc brood because my bees really don't have too much disease I haven't seen AFB in years I don't think I guess I could probably identify EF B if I had to but choc root is a real issue and by selecting from colonies that never have chalk brood I believe that I'm selecting for hygienic nests temper well we all know temper is important do you really want these that's staple your socks to your ankles I don't want these that's staple my socks to my ankles I want these I can handle wearing a t-shirt and a veil I don't like to wear get all dressed up you know I work 80 hours a week in the bees I can't I can't be working like that with a with a veil in a hood on myself honey produced that's an important aren't you trying to produce honey well shouldn't you at least select the colonies that within the yard for possible breeders so among the colonies that produce the most honey in the yard what about how much sugar you feed them if you feed them sugar shouldn't that in some way be reflected in the total production so would you would you select a colony that made 150 pounds of honey and had to be fed 50 pounds of sugar or would you select a colony that made 80 pounds of honey and didn't have to be fed anything perhaps the latter so you make a yard sheet and your yard sheet would contain these different selection criteria that you think are the most important to you and to your bees and to your beekeeping you keep track of the Queen this one I can keep track of the Queen for a number of years for four years or the population how about the population the first time you pull the crown board in I would say March what would you say February okay what's the population the population on the very first time that you pull that crown board off is the population of the bees that wintered they're not really starting brood routing yet there hasn't been a lot of bee replacement for winter loss so a colony that comes through the winter with a huge cluster of bees and there's no bees dead bees on the ground and there's no dead bees on the bottom board to me means that those bees individually are able to winter it's not a colony with a big cluster that loses half the clustered on the ground in the winter or reversing I reverse my colonies of boxes and I keep track of how many frames of brood there are in that colony at the time so that would be brood the amount and the pattern I might I might keep track of the pattern say by one to five or week to our week to good or minus and plus something however you do it just so you can identify which colonies have more brood and which patterns are better you keep track of what diseases are present whether cha crews is present if you if you count 400 mites how many 400 mites are present and the next time you look at that colony and you you mark down and you look for varroa you Calliphora and each time you count for OE you look at the change in population is it a colony that goes from one might to five mites to ten mice to fifty mites or is their colony that goes from one might to two mites to three mites to three mites to four mites that's a good way of keeping track of what that colony is doing with its for all population or how about temper I think temper can be broken up into three categories it's not just about how many stings you get it's how nervous these bees are are they runny are they run ejp bees that when you look at a comb they're running around the comb like mad mad like mad women and they're dripping off the corner onto the ground you don't want that or when you open up a colony and reach across to do something they bang off your wrist or they butt off your head that's a nervous indication that's a nervous disorder that's all related to the stinging nervous runny disorder you want to keep track of that how much honey is produced there's three there's three category three columns they're three rows I can keep track of how much honey was produced for three years or how much sugar was fed well I weigh all my bee hives we weigh every beehive before we feed it and we feed it accordingly to how much it weighed that's a very accurate measure you could pit you could pick up the back of a hive and say to yourself this is a light hype or this is a heavy hive well as I said this morning I can't afford to feed my bees more than they need and if you start picking up beehives to weigh them by the time you get done with the first apiary they all start feeling heavy and so what are you going to do you're going to err on the side of caution and you're going to feed extra syrup I can't afford to feed extra syrup to a thousand colonies one gallon to a thousand colonies is several thousand dollars plus the time involved so I try to get it a little bit a little bit more accurate and that's why we weigh our bees but that's something that you have to keep track of so how do you manage this breeder Queen this is a breeder box this is a breeder hive it's a standard box with a vertical queen excluder you see three combs between the third and fourth column from the right side that white line is a vertical Queen excluder the entrance in that three comb cavity has a block in it so the Queen can't leave the hive the crown board is nothing more than a bag which the witch the cover pushes down against that Queen excluder preventing the Queen from escaping from that cavity and by managing the combs in that cavity I can time the age of the larvae so that there are large between egg and 12 hours old on the day that I graft and I keep track of them you can see the dates on the on the combs you can see that I put one in on May 30th and one on June 3rd and one on June 7th well defy the May 30th column 12 days ago was against the excluder and on grafting day i graft from that and then on the day I have to add another cone I pull the one where 5:30 is now I pull that column moving across the excluder to a space that I made vacant by pulling a frame of honey out of the far side of the box I move 6 3 & 6 7 over and I put a new grafting comb where 6 7 was and she jumps right on that column and lays it up and on grafting day I have larvae that are between egg and 12 hours old it's very important when you raise Queens to get though to have Graf double larvae that are as close to the egg as you can handle yes cast determination casts are in the hive our worker bees and queen bees both females and this cast determination is done sometime between zero and three days at approximately three days a female larva can no longer be changed into a queen but does that mean that you can graft a two and a half day larva and get the same queen that you can get when you graft a twelve hour old larva I don't think so I think it's a matter of degree I think the farther you are away from egg the lower the quality of the queen so you're trying to graph the larva that's as close to the egg as you can get and this is the only way that I can do it in abundance I could go through a colony I could go through a favorite colony and find larvae that are 12 hours old but it's it's too much work for me as a commercial Queen producer so I would much prefer to do it this way and be sure of it so you can see here I've mu I foot another comb in so grafting if you can look at find the very smallest larva that you can see there that's more or less what size I'm talking about now if you look at if you look at the top row of cells the third one from the right you notice that you see that larva in the bottom that tiny do you see the egg right next to it an egg and a larva in the same cell this happens all the time sometimes I see two larvae in an egg sometimes I see a couple eggs try grafting that little larva with that egg next to it it's you have to wipe the egg off before you can deposit the larva in your cup but you see how the egg is larger than the larva that's the right size to graft the very smallest larva you can you can find or do you see four cells from the right on the top row what do you see there two larvae do you see one is bigger than the other that's the one you want to graph from that's the size that you're trying to graph from the lighting is terrible on this I don't know if you can see the larva in that it's my note and that's my point you can't see the larva in that because it's so small if you can see it really well it's too old in fact I need I need help now I used to be able to do it real well this is grafting this is putting the the larva in the cups that's me grafting this is my fancy grafting Hut I used to have a tent and do it in a tent to keep the bugs in the mosquitos and the robber bees off me I much prefer this I put in you know handle violin concertos or something and I can just sit there and graft all day long not get a sore back but you can see I have a headlamp and I'll have jeweler loops on my head so I can see these larvae so I can handle them properly so on grafting day I break grafting day up into two into two sections grafting day morning grafting day afternoon crafting day morning I have to get the sell builder ready to graft so remember the sell builder that was a brood chamber and a honey super and an excluder and a honey super and my brood that I put above there on the left in that picture is that partially filled honey super and brood box that was above the excluder behind is the queen right section of that hive so I lift it off the two boxes above the excluder and put them to the side on an upturn cover I've checked them all for Queen cells so I know there's no Queen cells in this box I removed the Queen right colony from the bottom board wiggle it back walk it back onto the ground turn it around 180 degrees and face it the other direction then I put a new bottom board on the hive stand and I put my partially filled honey super on the bottom and then I put my box of mostly immerged brood on the honey super the reason I'm putting that honey super on the bottom is twofold first off it insulates my cell building my cell building frame that when I put the graft in from the cold temperatures at the bottom it also has frames of partially filled honey partially filled honey combs nectar bees do not like nectar on the bottom board and they move it up and moving it up outs like a honey flow isn't that what bees do on a honey flow they bring the nectar in they put it wherever they can put it you know the filled bees come in with their nectar load they give it to a receiver bee and they go get more and the receiver bee takes it and puts it in a cell and where does she put it in the closest cell she can find so she can go get in another load then at the end of the flow in the evening or whatever they move it up they move it up to where it belongs they move it up and out of the brood nest that's exactly what's happening and so it acts like there's a flow and you need to have a flow in order to raise quality Queens so I take the colony apart and I and I and I set it up the way it is there this is what you're looking for lots of bees this is the top box this was the brood that I put in there ten days ago the two honey combs are on the outside edge and the seven frames of brood er in the middle it was already emerging ten days ago so it's mostly emerged now those bees are a perfect age now most of them to be nurse bees well we all know that we need pollen you have to have a pollen comb too a queen bees that's their protein where do you get that pollen cone you could go through a production hive and look for that pollen cone but gosh that's an awful lot of work to take all the supersoft and go through the brood nest and try to find a suitable pollen comb sometimes there are no pollen combs you could look all day through production colonies and there's no pollen combs because there's no pollen flow they're using it up as fast as that are able to get it so then what do you do you make a pollen comb you trap some pollen you keep it in your freezer until the day you need it you put you choose a nice clean worker comb you dump pollen on it and you rub it in with your fingers you work the pol and into the cells with your fingers making a beautiful pollen comb such as one you've never seen before you've never seen a pollen comb like that but this is the kind of pollen that they need they need an abundance of pollen to raise a good queen cell so here it is I take the outside to calm shout because those were the honey combs I make a space in the middle and I place the pollen column in that space the little arrow points to the side of the frame where the pollen is and you're going to want to put your graft directly next to that side of the pollen you don't want on the other side bees don't move pollen you need the pollen right next to the graft now you have to get the nurse bees in that cell builder how do you get the nurse bees in that cell builder some people say they lure them in with open brood I don't put open brood to my cell builder I don't want open brood in my cell builder I don't want to share my nurse bees with with any frame of brood I want all my nurse bees to jump on the cells and they're only cells they have only larvae they have to fade are the larvae in my graft so adding the nurse bees how do you get the nurse bees where you want them you put them there you don't rely on some tray you don't rely on smoke and gassing the bees up through a queen excluder with a metal slide in it and gas them up through there and hope that you get the right amount of piece you put the bees where you need them well how do you do that well there's bears on the left is the box is the cell builder yeah we that we put the pollen comb in on top of that I put a shaker box what's a shaker box it's a hive body it's a brood box with a wood bound excluder nailed on the bottom I put that on top of my cell builder then I take apart the Queen rights section which is what's there on upturned in outer covers and I shake the core of the brood nest into that shaker box and run those bees down through the Queen excluder into the cell builder so what happens if there's a queen in the on those combs I'm shaking she gets trapped in the shaker box and can't go down into the cell builder okay so I pull a comma brood out up there's the Queen good I'll put her over here in a separate box and keep her happy and keep her safe and just start shaking bees into the brood box right into the cell builder what about the second queen how many bee hives halves two queens how many bee hives have three Queens it happens more often than you think it does I've seen 30 percent of my colonies have multiple Queens before by shaking them through Queen excluders is the only way you'll know it's incredible how many times a colony will have multiple Queens through super seizure so you have to get them also you can't stop at the first queen so rather than trying to look and look and look and have you ever looked for the Queen and pull the comb of brood out and the Queen's not there right you put it in a new queue give it a queen it slaughters your Queen why because you just stole the Queen from the high because you didn't see her this way you're not going to miss her she's going to be running around in that there's the shaker box getting ready to have be shaken in it there's what happens when you shake the bees out of the core of the brew nest inside that shaker box you put a couple inches of duct tape these hate duct tape I don't know if it's slippery or it smells bad or it doesn't feel right but the bees come up the sidewall to where the duct tape is and they stop and you'll see that there's a queen in that box you'll see her running around the side wall where it's attached to the Queen excluder trying to get down through that Queen excluder and you know her big abdomen she's doing this and she's running around that side wall trying to get down and she's telling you Here I am Here I am just like the tail of a deer you know when it runs off through the field you can see that's what you see you see that white tail go like this the white-tailed deer of North America I don't know if you're red deer and all those have white tails but it's just like a deer and she's waving her little butt at you and there she is so you shake the core of the brood nest out leaving enough bees in the Queen right section to care for what brood is in there you don't shake them all out and so this is what it looks like right after you shake it you shake the bees out you put the crown board on and you put a feeder on it these bees have to be fed they have to be on a honey flow now you don't have to feed them right if they're on a good honey flow do you maybe what happens if it rains tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next day there's no honey flow what happens if all the farmers cut their fields on the same day just ended the honey flow so you have to have a feeder on these so I put a feeder can on the crown board Hall and I feed them as long as they're drawing the cells out before they seal them they have to have a source of carbohydrate and this is what you're creating you're creating this colony that's full of nurse bees they have no larvae from which to raise a queen we call that hopelessly queenless they start to NACE enough the nascent off glands are all up there roaring you know the queenless roar you can tell when bees know their queenless they make this roar they stick their butts up like this and expose the Nason off gland grafting day is finished morning grafting day morning is finished the colony has been set up you've created this hopelessly queenless unit that's overflowing with nurse bees and they have no larvae to feed take a break relax go have lunch listen to some Mozart you know this is supposed to be fun this isn't a stressful thing this is fun don't get all wound up no don't get a feeling here the bees are doing the work you did what you're supposed to do now they're going to do their part in the afternoon you come back to the cell builder this is what you find this one's got a hive top feeder on it I prefer to use cans now because hyped up feeders are too prone to cause robbing so I use gallon cans on the escape on the feed hole of the crown board these bees are totally frantic they're flying around the apiary they're crawling around the hive they're crawling all over the hive you can hear them crying they're roaring you're crying they're looking for something it's obviously they're looking for a queen or they're looking for a larva they're absolutely hopeless they know they're gonna they're not going to make it that's what you're trying to create that's why they jump on the graphs and just jump right on them and start making Queen cells because they're hopelessly queenless that's the space next to the pollen column you spread the frames at the pollen comb and you put your graft in like this breeder Queen 40 I keep track of which breeder Queen I have and they jump right on the cells right on the larvae and they start drawing them out it's unbelievable how fast that little colony will calm down within minutes the roaring stops the flying stops the crawling on the outside of the hive in a frantic fashion stops and the bees you can hear them go and they all go in it's amazing they all just they go right in they all know they're safe now they can raise their Queens five days after you graft the cells are sealed at that point you can pull the feeder you pull the the cell box that cell the cell builder and the partially filled super off the bottom board you walk the Queen right section back up on to the stand facing the original direction remember when we set that cell builder up we put all the nurse bees in there but the little colony was facing the same way it was before so they've got all the field bees and all the nurse bees so they make this gigantic colony with all the resources they need so five days after you graph the cells are sealed you take the cell builder off the stand you put the Queen right section back up on the stand you reinstall the Queen excluder you put the partially filled super and cell builder it back above the Queen excluder and you're done for that day so then you're harvesting the cells ten days after you graft the cells are ready to go five days after you reunited the colony the cells are ready to go because you had so many nurse bees because their nutrition was so overwhelming that these bees make such Queen cells filling them with such an amount of royal jelly it's incredible how fat and big they make you need to keep them warm you need to handle them like eggs and you put them somewhere like in a nuke but this is what you get do you see the cup on the left you see the jelly this is the this is the pupa this pupa is going to emerge in two days she's not eating any more jelly that's leftover jelly that that cell had so much jelly in it that that pupa that larva couldn't eat it all that young pupa couldn't eat all that jelly there was an abundance of jelly that's what you're looking for well here's one that was full of jelly packed with jelly if there's so much jelly in it like that that's abnormal opening it up you find that it's a dead larva it didn't eat any of the jelly so yes you have to be discriminating on which cells you use you might want to hold them up to the light and see if there's a little pupa wiggling around you don't want to lose one like this this one they really got it wrong these definitely make a mistake once in a while this pupa is upside down the butt that the tip of the Queen cells at the bottom the Queen's head is at the top this queen will never hatch she'll die I take the cells out I put them in I take them to my mating yard I put them in the mating nooks where we call Queens yesterday then I can restock my cell builder this is one of the things that makes this sustainable I go back to the apiary I checked my cell builder for Queen cells making sure there's no swarm cells I removed the what was the former cell builder which is now pollen and nectar because all the brood is emerged I take it off shake it out on the ground like this and give them another box of brood and set it up for a second time twenty days later I remove the cells come back in the afternoon set it up for a third time it's the same colony being used over and over again now if I was just going to use the resources of that colony I'd only be able to do it once and that colony would be would be in a real challenge to build itself up for winter but by adding resources to this colony instead of using up the resources of this colony I can continue every twenty days I can get another graft drawn out in that colony think about this so after two rounds after the second round I find an average of 15 frames of brood below the Queen excluder that's not what I added to the colony that's what the cot that's what the Queen in that colony is maintaining and the nurse bees in that colony are maintaining have you ever seen a colony with 15 frames of brood seven of which are open bees open brood takes a lot of nurse bees to do something like that that's what you're creating here you're creating a maximum of nurse bees to create a maximum of royal jelly to feed your cells it makes me wonder if we ever actually see the potential of our queens reached do they ever reach their full potential we're always messing with them splitting them trying to keep them from swarming pulling out brood making nukes does that colony ever reach her full its full potential I don't think so because the more bees you have the more brood and the more brood you have the more bees and the more bees you have the more brood etc and it's exponential and one supports the other and you create these monster colonies that create beautiful queen cells this is the cell building apiary after the last cells have been removed from that colony from that yard so I raised some 1,500 Queens from this colony from this yard and harvested over two tons of honey imagine two tons of honey from 30 cell builders and 1,500 Queens to boot totally sustainable you're not using up your apiary so using the cells can use them for reek weaning you can make a nuke and really you can kill an old queen and put a queen cell in the hive but did you ever try putting Queen cells in Queen Wright hives you know you can put ripe Queen cells up in the supers when there's a honey flow on and what happens the colony supercedes using those Queen cells it's exactly what honey bees do honey bees grow cells supercede yourselves on the flo reek wean their queen the Virgin hatches out they sort it out sometimes both Queens live for a while so by putting these Queen cells in the honey supers on a honey flow has to be on a flow it has to be in the honey supers the Virgin emerges gets mated and lays and eventually the old Queen disappears or you can make nukes for wintering or nukes for increase lots of things you can do with those Queen cells you can put them in mating nooks you can use standard your standard size frame for mating nooks this is a standard lang straw box divided in two with an entrance on each side made queenless next day give it a queen give each side of queen sixteen to twenty one to twenty whatever rotation you're on days later you pull the Queen your schedule has another batch of cells ready for the next day you go back the next day you give it some more cells sixteen or twenty one or twenty eight days later you pull the Queen the next day you have another batch of cells ready and so on and so forth so we do this all summer long we do this from the early May until we caught our last Queen's on July 1st this year on July 31st excuse me or you can use little nating nukes you can use the AP day mating nukes a little mini columns well this is my own version of that this is a standard brew box divided the short way you know we don't have the National which is a square our calling our boxes are 20 20 inches deep long and 16 and a quarter wide so I put a 5/8 piece of wood no enough 5/8 9/8 it'll be a five quarter it's called five quarter so if you make frame rests on the top of that five quarter it's really an inch and an eighth and if the inch in if the frame rest is in it is three eighths you get a three eighths frame rest and a three eighths piece divider and another three eighths frame rest and these are nothing but standard frames cut down to fit the little cavity you just made so you make your own frames from from store-bought knockdown frames remail the ends and make these little combs so each side it sits on a bottom board that central divider sits on a cleat so the bees can't cross under from one side to the other there's another cleat in the middle of each cavity running the long way and the feeder that's a division board feeder it's got two cavities in it each cavity has an entrance for the bees to go in from the opposite side the holes you see there are nothing more than fill holes that's where you fill the feeder you put the bag on top the cover holds pushes the bag down against the central divider and against the top of the feeder so the bees can't crawl in and over so they go into that little hole for their feed if they need it you're it's you're able to move that feeder to one side and have an eight comb nuke or you can put it in the middle middle a slot and have two four frame nooks so when we're making Queens both feeders are in the middle creating four different cavities each with their own entrance and we put a queen cell in sixteen or twenty one or whatever days later we pull the Queen out next day we put Queen cells back in this is the nating yard I use there's over 500 mating nooks in this yard you can only see a part of it and this this mating yard is is divided into four groups and each group has and each group has four circles and each circle has eight four-way mating nooks for a total of 38 per circuit and or 128 per group and there's four groups and we do one group each day we catch the Queens next day we put queen cells in four days after we catch the first group we catch Group two next day we put queen cells in four days after group - we catch Group three it's so on after four days after we catch Group four we're back to group one again we catch Group one again their cells ready to go in Group one again we put the cells in like that sixteen days later can you see why I'm on a 16 day cycle because there is four circles and every four days I do them and that's sixteen days some say that it's better leave your Queens laying four more days I would say you're probably right but in this in my commercial operation I don't really get so strong in these little ones that it's really difficult to find the Queens here's the cell building yard being fed for fall autumn they've got their feeder shells on top and a can on top of each one of each nuke that the half the Queens have been caught and the feeders have been moved over to one side and all the Queens have been given eight combs instead of four and they're wintered they're moved to their winter locations they're given an extra box on top that's got ten mating Newcomb's in it so now each Queen has 18 mating Newcomb's delay she builds up into that pack sit with honey and brood goes through the winter in the spring the day before Queen cells are ready we break it down again fill out fill all the nuke box as we can with brood for group one possibly leaving the white boxes on a bottom board adding another white box to the top of each so that we can have these things build up a gun and we can use them to wreak wean beehives or whatever we want this is what it looks like there's two nukes here each of them have 18 columns you can see the feeder in the bottom box has been moved over to the sidewall so Queen had a comb so we added ten more above you see what they do see how they pack it with honey those are all nice honey combs that are above them for the winter then we have to catch the Queen's catching the Queen's is is my favorite day of the whole year my favorite day of the week or every four days is catching Queens I love catching Queens but this is what happens can you imagine trying to find a queen in that thing so if I go too long and I let them get too strong I can't it's really difficult to find the Queens hence why we go sixteen days and we're still pulling brood or honey or bees out of the mating Nuuk to keep it the population down enough so we can find the Queens so here's my queen crow my queen catching crew there's four of them there's four columns in the box I'm the designated catcher marker cager so they bring me the column with the Queen I have a little table I pick the call the Queen off the column I have a little pile of bees on my table I just shake bees on my table which is actually an upturned cover I mark the Queen I caged the Queen I had nine attendant peas and corker put her in a box they bring me another Queen sometimes they're so good I can't keep up with them I'm frantically stuffing Queens in cages and marking Queens and trying to keep up with them we do 128 Queens every four days the famous Sam Comfort if you know Sam Comfort if you've heard of he's the top bar guru in the u.s. he teaches everybody about top bars Tommy and Kate and cork Clark is the is the frame puller the one on the left he's a frame pull he's got to hook hives he's just pulling combs out and giving a comb to everybody so you pull out all four combs at once she doesn't have a chance to run away she's on one of those combs you can just look like this and find the Queen so you have to find the Queen imagine 120 of 8 of those in a day and you're intently staring at this did you ever do any welding or soldering and you intently stare at that little spot of light and all night long you weld or you or you solder because you see that little black that little white line going across your brain same thing with catching queen bees you see the shine on the bee you're so intently staring at that shine looking for the Queen that all night long you're seeing bees in your dreams and they come in in the morning especially after the first day they come in in the morning and they're just everybody's going oh my god do you get any sleep last I know I needed to sleep last night I caught Queens all night but there is a queen in that photograph and if you're if you're good at it you can probably see that Queen she's somewhere in the middle she's pretty close to the center of the comb now you see her she's right above that spot see her right above that spot there's the queen but did you know I mean you all know on Star Trek and the Klingons and the cloaking device did you know who invented the cloaking device yes it was queen bees because that queen bee is right there but you can't find her and there she is and you say there she is and you look back and she's gone she's got the device on cork says look away you look away and you look back oh here she is she turned it off and that's what you get you get these beautiful Queens you don't send away for them you don't buy them you grow them the bees grow them you just set it up for them to do the best job they can this is how I mark the Queen's I use a piece of piece of Timothy I don't use those silly marking pens I use a testers model paint enamel or whatever hobby you anomaly you can get here I don't know what what brand it would be put the very very smallest little drop of paint on that end of that Timothy and here I'm trying to mark this Queen if you if you buy your queens marked and you have to pay a dollar or whatever it is a pound or whatever it is that you have to pay the breeder to mark your Queens and you object paying that fee should have your head examined honestly do you see that one with the white spots she's been following me around all day I can blow her off I sneak homes right back and I blow them off and go over here and try to mark these back on there again I'll blow him off and I'll go over there to the back of the room my garter Martin there she is again they don't stop the only way I can get rid of her is to pop her little head and throw her away and they're stinging my fingers and you can see the black spots and it's and they get in the paint on the Queen and they smudge the paint it's not so easy so if you're paying to have your Queen smart lucky you and what if you have a small backyard apiary and you only got two or three hives you don't really have the resources to raise Queens over time you could raise a batch of Queens you could raise a couple Queens like this but you can't raise Queens over time and head and do a good job and have good selection and and not get in bread and things what do you do you support your local queen breeder there's plenty of people in your area raising Queens and the best Queens are going to come from your own area grown under the same conditions that you're keeping your bees thank do you ever have to use pollen substitute if you you've got a lot of bees in a yard and I'm just wondering if you always have a huge amount of pollen I do I do have a large amount of pollen because I trap my pollen in the spring I have a dozen pollen traps and I can cat I can trap over a hundred pounds of pollen in those in two weeks which gives me all the pollen I need for the whole season if I didn't have any pollen or I only had a limited amount yes I have used pollen substitute and I have used a mix of pollen and pollen sub and worked it into the combs and it's done a reasonably good job if I had my druthers I would rather use pure pollen do you take any precautions to avoid inbreeding yes I i don't grow all my queens from a few number of of breeders a nice little and i surround my mating yard with a number of apiaries to have all the stock all the best stock I can get from all different breeders so that's really about all we can do we don't have we don't have the Moors like you do I can't really call nice could you have in an area and we feel a confident of avoiding inbreeding I have five apiaries with 25 colonies within two miles of that apiary so I do pretty well I don't really have an inbred problem when you have your queenless setup ready to graft do you ever put a queen excluder underneath it to stop a stray virgin i think that's a real good idea because that queenless situation is just begging for a queen and if a virgin emerges from anywhere in that apiary and smells that she's attracted to that and yes that virgin will go in the cell builder and destroy your cells so yes it's actually a good idea i don't do it because my cell builders get so strong they get so packed with bees that i'm afraid they wouldn't be able to ventilate properly but i get i get cell builders these Elle builders are so strong that the entire box cover feeder box Zell building box right to the ground out on the ground is covered with bees for those for those five days in fact the feeder can in the top of the above the crown board the bees there's so many that they build a circular comb off the top of the can up this high because the whole thing is full of bees because it's got all the filled bees and all the nurse bees so yes I think that's a very good idea but I don't do it and I do lose one once in a while yeah do you do anything to enhance the drone population in the area where you're meeting extra situation used wrong calm but there's plenty of drone come in my bees but I have well-stocked apiaries all around my cell building yard one last question you have you're moving a lot of bees from colony to colony that sort of backwards and forwards how do you stop them fighting each other they don't fight they don't fight these don't I don't know why but they don't so you just chuck them in of course thank you you

Channel: National Honey Show

Views: 261,547

Rating: 4.8382978 out of 5

Keywords: queen rearing, mike palmer, beekeeping, honey bees, queen bees, national honey show

Id: R7tinVIuBJ8

Length: 71min 10sec (4270 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 27 2013