The Buzz Newsletter

April 2005

 

 

Page 5

Raising Queens in a Nuc Box

Two summers ago, we decided to experiment with raising some of our own queens. While the spring starts with queens in all the hives, parent colonies go queenless and some of the splits either reject their queen or don’t get a queen that lasts the season. Requeening a split or parent colony is a much less risky venture if you have an established queen with a couple of frames of bees and brood. Also, I often favor slipping a queen nuc into hives that have recently swarmed. My thought is that an established queen with a few frames of bees to protect her will generally prevail over the virgin from the swarm cell, and, in any case, the odds of a swarm hive successfully requeening itself are only seventy-five percent even with good weather. If the bees ultimately reject the nuc queen in favor of the virgin, at least the colony won’t be weeks behind in brood rearing. We figure on a colony count decline of at least ten percent over the course of the spring and summer if we do not have queen nucs on standby.

We chose to graft our own queens for a number of reasons. There is some sense in selecting from the queens that have performed best in your system, there is very little cash investment if you have some spare equipment on hand, and I was simply intrigued with the idea of raising some of our own queens. Several years ago the IHPA had a field day down at Lee Little’s place, and in the course of conversation Lee suggested that it was possible to produce respectable queen cells without huge numbers of bees. That sounded like the ticket for someone who only wanted to produce queens on a small scale. My initial attempt at cell building was executed in a nine frame broodbox, but thinking back on Lee’s comments, I thought the process might be simplified by using a four-frame nuc box for the next round of queens.

The key to success is making certain that the bees that go into the nuc are nurse bees from the broodnest. I want to see bees hanging all along the cell frame when enough nurse bees have been shaken into the nuc. For the three frames that go into the nuc with the cell frame, I use a frame of almost completely sealed brood on each side of the cells, and the third frame is a mix of honey and pollen. Since I feed the bees with a mason jar of corn syrup until the queen cells are sealed, it’s useful to make sure the third frame has room for syrup or the bees will draw wax on the cell bars and make portions of the other combs too thick.

Our cell frame is simply a deep frame that has two rails grooved with a table saw. The rails are set in wooden blocks on each end of the frame that fit the rail. About thirty cell cups fit the arrangement. Ten days after grafting the newly hatched larvae, it’s time to set the cells out in nuc boxes for mating. All of our nuc boxes used for mating hold ordinary broodframes, so requeening is a simple matter of swapping frames. With ideal weather, three out of four queens should be mated and laying ten to fourteen days after emergence.

In my experience to date, the cells aren’t consistently as large as what you might achieve with a two or three-deep cell building system. I tend not to view this as a serious problem for a very small-scale queen rearing enterprise. While huge cells are impressive, there is an upper limit to the benefits of cell size. Giant cells are usually packed with excess royal jelly rather than a queen of inordinate size. An important advantage to cell builders that do produce very large cells is a higher percentage of finished cells which are acceptable for setting out for mating. I don’t think I’ve gotten more than twenty good cells at a time out of the nuc method. Then again, we haven’t dedicated a large amount of time to refining the process up to now. I’m also not the most adept grafter in the world. Better results might be possible. This system of starting and finishing cells in a nuc box isn’t suited to large scale queen production, but it is a remarkably simple and satisfying way to raise some extra queens with very minimal investment and significant potential return.

A final reason to raise some of your own queens is to get accustomed to handling them. Before embarking on this little venture into queen rearing, I was extremely reluctant to touch a queen. They are much more tolerant of handling than some of us tend to think. Simply pick her up by the wings, and then place the forefinger of your other hand under her body. She will automatically grab your finger with her legs, and then you can trap the three legs on one side of her body between your forefinger and thumb. In this position, marking a queen is easily accomplished.

Submitted by Adam W. Ebert

Coming Soon

The SE Iowa Beekeepers met at Ron Wehr’s place on March 26. A demo was given on how to fill formic acid pads. More info and pictures will appear in “The Buzz” next month.