Wirral Queen Rearing Workshop 2008
For some time now, Christine and I have been rearing queens using a method we learned at a one-week course at the National Bee Unit at York. In May 2007 we demonstrated the method at an evening convention of the Branch, following which we were asked to run a queen-rearing workshop. Isobelle Broughall, who had recently joined the Wirral Branch of the CBKA offered her garden at Hinderton Cottage for the workshop, which we ran this year.
Two colonies were selected for good temper and health, and transported to the site in March. The first requirement was to increase the population of these overwintered colonies to a size big enough for queen-rearing. To raise good queens, the colony must have plenty of nurse bees to provide a lavish supply of royal jelly. Uniting the two colonies was considered, as this would be quick, but we finally decided to feed the colonies, in order to build up the numbers. This was slower than uniting, but ensured that we had a back-up colony if one should fail.
Weekly varroa checks indicated a heavy infestation in the back-up colony. The mite population was reduced by treatment with two packs of Apiguard followed by icing sugar. Both colonies then made good progress, despite the very wet April.
The system of queen-rearing adopted (which was more fully described in my article in the Summer magazine) requires two brood-boxes separated by a queen-excluder. The queen remains in the bottom box, and queen-rearing takes place in the top box. By the end of April we were able to make the first rotation of the combs—i.e. sealed brood and larvae were moved above the queen-excluder, and empty combs moved down for the queen to lay in.
When the box above the queen excluder was nearly full of sealed or emerging brood, a frame-feeder, a frame of pollen, a frame of grafted one-day-old larvae in plastic queen-cups and a frame of young larvae, were added to it—in that order. This ensures plenty of nurse bees in the right place, to feed the grafts. The empty queen-cups need to be in the hive for 24 hours to let the bees prepare them, before receiving the grafts.
Grafting was done weekly by Frank Taylor, who had been queen rearing with us for a couple of years, and had been an avid student. Success rates varied: our best batch was 13 accepted out of 16. Our worst was when all the grafts were ignored by the bees! This happened, we discovered, because we had inadvertently moved a natural queen-cell into the cell-rearing box. This occurred towards the end of the programme and was not a disaster. We just had to run one extra week.
Members brought and set up ten queenless nucs at the site into which we introduced sealed queen-cells. Two failed to emerge, and were replaced with a second sealed queen-cell. All emerged queens mated and produced sealed worker brood. The queens were then marked and the nucs were taken away by their respective owners. Sealed queen-cells were also given to members who wanted to change or replace lost queens at their home apiary. Finally the queen-rearing colony, which had grown to three brood-boxes, was itself split into six five-frame nucs.
During one inspection to check for eggs from the new queens, three members were informed that their queens had landed on them, much to general amusement. Moral—don’t stand in front of the hive! Members also witnessed a queen returning with the mating sign and being greeted by the bees.
Because of the poor weather, the workshop, having started in mid-March, ran until mid-June. Four batches of queens were raised, but with this system more can be raised. The limiting factor is having enough bees to support the new queens. Further information on this method can be found in a paper entitled “Rearing queen honey-bees in a queen-right colony” published in the American Bee Journal in April 2002.
John Hebron
Photographs by Marshall Pugh
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