Steve Donohoe walks through his method for making the best queen cells he has ever seen. It's the same method as used by Brother Adam, back in the day, and by Mike Palmer, and others.
Hello and welcome. Today we are going to be walking through an article by Steve Donohoe which explains how he makes the best queen cells he's ever seen. This is part of raising queens; a subject close to Steve's heart. If you have great queens, your beekeeping will be a lot more pleasant and productive than if you don't, and the best way to make great queens is to follow the masters.
By the way, my name is Imogen, and I'm reading from Steve's blog article on his website called "The Walrus and the Honey Bee". I may only be an artificial person, but I'm better at speaking than Steve, so he's delighted that I'm doing this instead of him. So, grab a nice cup of tea, or coffee, or whatever tickles your fancy, and listen to me. Here goes.
A year ago, the very idea of starting to raise queens at this time was madness, such was the hideous weather. This year, spring has been kinder, and I have already done my first batch of grafts. Now, I know that the easiest part of raising queens is making cells, and getting virgins well-mated is an important (and not always possible) step, but today I’m going to describe how to make the best possible queen cells.
In my opinion, the steps involved with making queens, with associated difficulty levels, are as follows:
1. Selecting your breeder queen – as long as you keep notes, this is not very difficult. I choose the queens that made me lots of honey last season, showed no signs of swarming, were well-behaved, and healthy. Normally, they are going into their third season, but if I buy an inseminated breeder queen, she could be much younger. With bought queens, I trust the breeder. The other thing I try to do is use queens from different lines every year; a breeder queen only provides daughters for me for one season. I want to minimise inbreeding and maximise diversity, while still keeping pleasant and productive bees. Difficulty level 3 out of 10.
2. Making queen cells – there are many ways to do this, and you have to find what works for you. I like grafting, which is not difficult, but it might take a few goes to get into the swing of it. My son picked it up straight away. He uses a bright light and his naked mole eyes; I use some magnifying lenses. We graft into JZBZ cell cups. Once the cells are made, they are easy to handle, whereas if you do the Miller method (with no grafting), it’s fiddly to cut the cells from the comb. I’ll talk about this in more detail below, but it’s easy enough. Difficulty level 6 out of 10.
3. Getting virgin queens mated – this can be a demoralising stage because it’s not going to happen if conditions are poor. They like a pleasant, sunny day, and sometimes those are hard to come by in these parts. We use cell protectors, then place the cells into mating nuclei. The nuclei can be mini-plus or full-sized nukes, or those baby ones (such as Apideas and Kielers), and must be populated with young bees and have food stores available. Difficulty level 7 out of 10.
4. Introducing mated queens to a new colony – after all the effort of producing a beautiful mated queen, it is very annoying if, upon introducing her to a new colony, they kill her. This happens surprisingly often. There are many theories and methods surrounding successful queen introduction, but I won’t go into them here. Difficulty level 8 out of 10.
I might give them different scores in a week’s time, but that’s where I’m at today.
Anyway, I wanted to talk about how to make the best queen cells, which will hopefully go on to make the best queens. I have tried quite a few approaches, and I always come back to the method used by Brother Adam, Mike Palmer, and others. What I want to see are big, juicy queen cells with loads of jelly visible in the translucent JZBZ cup, showing that the developing queen has an excess of nutrients to aid her development. The method I will describe achieves this.
Time of Year
Theoretically, you can make queen cells anytime, even when it’s snowing. As long as the right conditions are in place within the cell builder, the bees will build cells. However, the time when all the stars align, when it seems to go best of all, is early in ‘swarm season’. For me, this appears to be from mid-April to the end of May, but it can vary. Last year, swarming got pushed into June and July because the spring weather was so bad. When the bees are making preparations to swarm is a great time to make queens – it’s what they want to do anyway.
Cory Stevens actually uses colonies that are building swarm cells as cell-builders. He gets rid of the cells made by the bees and adds his grafted larvae. The first round may not be as good as the second because initially there is competition from other larvae on the combs. Once these rogue cells are removed, the only way for them to make a queen is to use what the beekeeper has provided.
You need there to be drones in hives, of course. I have lots of them wandering about in my hives already, and even if they have just arrived, they should be sexually mature and ready for mating three weeks after emerging. I found my first (and only, so far) charged queen cell in a colony on 11th April. No doubt the warm and sunny weather was a factor in bringing them along so quickly. Although we are back to grey skies and 16 °C, I have faith that I will get some good mating days in early May. And if not, I will have to kill unmated queens and try again.
I do make queens into July, and sometimes August, but at such times there is much less brood in hives; brood which I need to create a strong cell-builder with an excess of nurse bees. I also have to feed syrup and pollen patties later in the season, whereas right now, natural pollen and nectar is everywhere.
Cell Building: Step One – sealed brood
As part of swarm prevention, we remove a frame or two of sealed brood from colonies that are booming and likely to swarm if not so treated. These brood frames go into nucleus boxes and are brought to my home base, where the queen-making happens. Moving frames between apiaries is risky, so make sure you are aware of the symptoms of disease, or don’t do it. Mike Palmer keeps ‘brood factory’ nukes on the same site as his cell builders.
We add 8 frames of sealed brood to a Langstroth brood box. The other two frames will be mostly stores, especially pollen. This brood box will be placed on top of an already strong colony, to make a super-strong colony in a few weeks. Firstly, we go through the colony to make sure that there are no swarm cells and the queen has plenty of laying space. Above that, there is the excluder and two supers. We place a second excluder over the supers, then put the brood box with sealed brood on top.
We return about a week later to find and remove any queen cells made in the top box. This is important; a rogue virgin queen will mess things up.
Cell Building: Step Two – make it queenless
Ten to fourteen days after adding the box of sealed brood, it’s time to split the hive into two parts. One part will have the queen, but not many bees. The other part will be a monster, bursting with bees, but no queen.
We place a new floor beside the existing hive, pointing in a different direction (typically perpendicular). Onto this goes the bottom brood box – the one with the queen, and later on, it gets a super on top too.
The queenless hive is set up as follows:
floor
super
brood box (the one that had the sealed brood, now largely emerged)
roof
Later in the season, there would be a cover board on top with a bucket-type syrup feeder over the feed hole, but this doesn’t seem necessary early on, unless the weather turns bad. The super on the floor causes bees to move nectar upwards, which is what happens during a honey flow.
We shake lots of nurse bees from frames in the queen-right hive into the queenless one, making sure that the queen stays where she is (out of the cell builder!).
Cell Building: Step Three – grafting
Next, we grab a frame of eggs and young larvae from our selected breeder queen. These are in nucleus colonies on the same site. The bees are brushed off, and the frame is carried to our grafting room, which is a converted shipping container where we also extract honey.
The Mole and I graft a row of cups each, which is around 24 to 30 of them. Mine are on the top row and his go below. We have just purchased a bright LED table lamp to help see larvae of the right size, which are those closest to eggs on the frame – they are less than one day old. We use the Chinese grafting tool or, if the comb is soft, a fine paintbrush.
The frame of grafted larvae goes into the centre of the brood box of the cell-builder, with a frame of pollen alongside. The frame from which we grafted the larvae is returned to the breeder queen’s colony.
Cell Building: Step Four – recombine
We take a sneak peek at the grafting frame after three days, to make sure that queen cells are being made. If all goes well, we will have at least 80% success, which means around 20-24 big, fat, gorgeous queen cells. Next, we recombine the colony. The brood box to the side, with the queen, returns to its original place on the original floor. Then the excluder, then the supers, the other excluder, and the brood box at the top with the cells in it.
Cell Building: Step Five – incubator
On the eighth day after grafting, we remove the grafting frame, brush off the bees, and carefully carry the delicate cells to the incubator. We have a Carricel portable incubator for moving cells, which keeps them warm. Each cell goes into a roller cage, which goes into a layer of foam in the incubator tray, which has holes in it (so that the roller cages can stand up in the holes). The incubator temperature is 34.5 °C, and we put some water in a tray at the bottom to keep up the humidity (60%-80%).
Cell Building: Back to Step One
At this point, we can do it all again! Split the hive into a small queen-right one to the side, and a strong cell builder into which the next round of grafts can go. Another 24–30 larvae, to make 20–24 cells. This can be kept going for a bit, but after the second round you really need to add more sealed brood, and the top box is beginning to get some honey stored in it. I normally stop after the second round and just allow this giant colony to make an enormous honey crop. I set up another cell builder later on, once my new queens have got mated and moved to full-sized nukes or hives.
Cell Building: Step Six – mating nukes
Two days after going to the incubator, the cells get moved to the mating apiary, and placed in nukes with a cell protector (the orange plastic ones made by JZBZ). The nukes are small queenless colonies which have bees, stores, and often brood. We break up our over-wintered mini-plus ‘towers’ into single boxes, each with bees, brood, and stores. We may also put a queen cell into a nuke made up from ‘spare’ brood and bees taken from strong colonies.
I may sometimes even resort to using Kieler nukes, if I have more cells than I know what to do with. However, I would rather use the cells to re-queen any colonies that have made swarm cells or those with old queens (in their third season). If a colony is going to swarm, I remove the queen in a nuke, destroy all swarm cells, and add a cell from the incubator (it must be protected). Based on Cory Stevens’ experience, I could use that colony as a cell builder if required. We will collect the royal jelly from the destroyed swarm cells and freeze it for later use, maybe. That’s the plan, anyway.
Oh, and sometimes stuff happens, and I get to the incubator later than planned, and I find emerging virgin queens. I quite like them, but introduction to established mating nukes can be a problem (a protected cell works; virgins can get killed). Virgins are probably best introduced to full-sized nukes or hives which have been rendered hopelessly queenless. The good thing about virgins is that you can examine them to ensure that they are large and healthy. Sometimes good-looking queen cells do not contain viable queens.
Jay Smith (1871 to 1958)
In his book ‘Better Queens’, Jay Smith described how he found a way to make the very best queen cells. After producing thousands of queens by grafting, he eventually came to the view that better cells could be made by cutting a row of eggs from a comb and sticking it to a top bar, which could be used instead of grafted larvae. I tried this once, and made a right pig’s ear of it, so I’m happy with grafting.
Final Thoughts
It might be argued that using one of those Jenter or CupKit systems should achieve a similar result, as queens could be made from eggs rather than young larvae. This might further be enhanced by trying to utilise the ‘maternal effect’ which David Evans, who runs The Apiarist website, has written about. To achieve that, you’d need to make artificial queen cups (which would be larger than worker cells), and persuade the queen to lay into them.
I know that you can make good queens using smaller cell builders than the gigantic one that I have described above. However, I know from my experience, and that of Brother Adam, Mike Palmer, and Jay Smith, that the best cells come from a colony that is on the edge of swarming. If they are bursting with young bees, with plenty of good nutrition, they make better cells. They just do.
Of course, if you don’t want 50 plus queens, and you don’t have many colonies, this won’t be for you. There are plenty of small-scale approaches, but this is the one that I have found to be the best for me. I also know people who use smaller cell builders, typically five frames over five in a double nuke, with great commercial success, and they know more about queen production than I do. So there are plenty of options!
That's the end of this podcast. I hope you learned something that will help with your queen rearing. Please share this with other beekeepers, and have a great week. Bye for now.