Steve Donohoe talks through his queen rearing process, from breeder queens, cell builders, grafting, and mating nucs. Based on his blog post on 2nd July 2024.
Intro and reasons for not using an AI reader.
01:30 Reasons for making queens
02:35 Importance of being organised, knowing timings, mindset - sometimes things go wrong
03:19 Breeder queens, Steve's three breeder queens in 2024 and why these were selected
06:45 Keeping breeder queens in nucleus hives
07:40 Drones, open mating, using drone comb
08:20 Using BeeBase
09:20 Re-queening poor colonies
10:08 Cell builders, double nuc method compared to Brother Adam method
12:50 Grafting day, checking for queen cells
14:50 Well fed larvae for grafting, two different grafting methods
17:50 Avoiding brace comb being build across queen cells
19:00 Removing queen cells and moving to the incubator
20:00 Effects of different incubation temperatures on queen development time and colour
21:30 Keeping the cell builder going through summer, bottlenecks in production
23:40 It's ok if you don't have an incubator
24:20 Mating nucs, Carricel portable incubator, cell protectors
25:20 Mini-plus hives and Kieler nucs, Steve much prefers Mini-plus and is phasing out the Kielers. Setting up a Kieler nuc for first use.
27:50 If queens don't get mated in 2-3 weeks they are replaced with a new cell
30:00 Advantages of Mini-plus, importance of letting queens mature for a month or more before introducing to a new colony
32:00 Over-wintering queens in nucs, re-queening production colonies after their second season, push-in cages
34:30 Failure to mate, drone laying queens
35:30 Making queens is very worthwhile, visit the blog post to view relevant images.