This year I am going to revisit my Queen cup method of queen rearing.
So the idea is to breed up some drones whilst preparing the cassette to accept new eggs.
- Set up the mother hive as a double brood. (As early as possible). Beginning of the season.
- Assemble all the kit for Queen rearing.
- Set up the cassette (shown on the right) with new cups, block the entrance hole and inset into a mother hive. Leave for 5 days to be cleaned and part of the hive.
- Remove 2 frames of brood and the cassette from the mother hive along with the Queen in the cassette and place in a nuc. Seal the nuc. 1 day.
- Remove the queen formt eh cassette and leave her sealed in teh nuc wiht fresh draawn comb and her 2 frames of brood.
- Take 20 of the cups each with a single egg and place them on the QC frame (Shown on the left). Place the QC frame into the mother hive that has now been queenless for 1 day.
- Leave for 20 days where the frames should now have loads of queen cells that are 5 days away from hatching.
- Put protective casings arround all the queen cells and wait for the final 5 days.
- Split the Mother hive into the desired number of poly nucs each with a single queen
Progress
Red hive is double brood from the beginning of the season.
3/6/23 step 2 got everything together.
3/6/23 Step 3 inserted the cassette into the hive.
8/6/23 All turned pear shaped!
Bloody bees don’t seem to read the correct text books.
Me !!
So I have done all this planning, set it up perfectly and what do I find?
So I thought I would avoid a swarm by double brooding the bees and they filled the double Langstroth box. I loaded up the plastic cassette for cleaning, left it for 5 days and came to remove it. The plan for tonight was to place the queen in the box with some other bees in a nuc and await some fresh eggs tomorrow. Trouble is what I found was no queen and a load of Queen cells.
Plan B – Multiple splits.
Multiple splits from the double brood hive. It is all hands on deck now with some urgent splits. The first Queen to emerge will likely kill all the other queens in the Queen cells or generate multiple swarms and as I have no idea how far through the brood cycle the queen cells are I have no idea how fast I have to act. Tomorrow it is then..
The idea now is to get the split boxes ready with some drawn comb and honey stores so that I can put 2 or 3 frames of bees on brood and one Queen cell into each. These will then be locked up for 48 hours and left in peace to acclimatise to their new home. The idea is that when released the majority of the bees will remain with the brood or realign to their new location. These bees will then hatch out the brood and the new queen who can mate and start the new colony in the nuc boxes. Same objective to achieve but different method.
5 poly nuc boxes, 2 poly hives one being the Mother hive and the purple hive is Queen less so will try and leave them an extra QC if there is one left over. Pretty sure there is 8 Queen cells available lets hope there is enough brood and drones around to raise all these new queens and colonies. FYI loads of drones are around..
17/6/23
Went to check to see if any of the queen cells had hatched with my little helper. And THEY ALL HAVE. I have queens in all 6 of the hives. Was a very quick check only to see if the queen was there and then close the hive again. Newly hatched queens are very scatty and easy to spook, so the less contact the better. Once they have mated and laid a few eggs they are far more settled and even if they fly away are likely to come back.
No idea at the moment if they are mated queens or virgin. My guess would be virgins as there was no sign of fresh eggs anywhere and loads of drones around. Would expect mating flights in the next 5 days. Followed by the beginning of laying eggs within the following week so I should have some fresh eggs in 14 days. Will check again in 14 days to look for some eggs. These queens came from my best hive so should be super productive.
These nucs have been used to repopulate my hives and return me to full capacity. Will try again in ’24 to rear some nucs using the kit above.