Hello Everyone!
(This is going to be a long blog post I’m afraid, BUT hopefully it will be an interesting one. There’s lots of pictures too!)
Early April Kat and I were captured in the terrible grasp of Coronavirus. It annoyingly took us both two weeks to overcome completely, of which I spent most of the time ‘ugly-crying’ and generally feeling sorry for myself. Kat, being the born and bred Yorkshire woman that she is, decided to use the illness as a way to prove she is superhuman; making sure any and all little jobs she’d been meaning to do for a while were completed in the free time she’d been granted by the deadly illness...
She is truly beautiful and terrifying to behold, let alone live with…
Due to me being laid up and not particularly copus mentus for half the month, I was unable to keep up with my writing schedule for you lovely people. Half of this blog post will be devoted to what I got up to last month and the other half will be this month’s shenanigans.
April – The Demaree Split
After such an early, warm start to spring, the bees had started expanding exponentially, much sooner than anyone could have predicted. Out of the 14 hives I had, 11 had started to make swarm preparations. These preparations include creating queen cups at the bottom and edges of brood frames and bullying the queen to lay in them. Once an egg has been laid, these queen cups are called “swarm cells” and generally, once bees have decided to swarm, there’s not much you can do to get it out of their heads.
Usually, a beekeeper would remove the queen and a few frames of bees and brood into a nuc box, then let the hives create new queens from the swarm cells. Unfortunately, this can weaken a hive, lessening their effectiveness during the honey flow. This is my first year trying to get as much honey as possible to sell to you lovely people so weakening my ‘production’ hives isn’t something I particularly want to do.
‘Production hive’ is the title you give to specific beehives you will be solely using for honey. Other titles are ‘queen-rearing hive’, ‘supplementary hive’, ‘mating hive’, etc; I’ll explain some of these other ones later in this blog post.
I started to research different methods of removing the swarm response whilst keeping the same queen. One big option that has become popular among beekeepers recently (thanks to Black Mountain Honey on YouTube) is something called the Demaree Split.
It involves removing the queen from all of her brood and placing her in an empty box with her flying bees, like would happen in a swarm. This is generally how you can do a normal split but a demaree split differs by placing all of the frames of brood on top of a bunch of honey supers. The distance between the brood and the queen means that the flying bees think that they have swarmed but as the brood hatch out, they are part of the same hive so pootle down to help the queen. This is the general theory anyway… if you’ve read any of my posts before then you’ll know my favourite saying: “bees don’t read books”.
More on that in a bit, for now I’ll show you the process in more detail.
Carni (The Carniolan Queen) started to throw up swarm cells on almost every frame and each one had a small little larva inside.
First, I had to find the queen, which was a bit of a nightmare as she is a trixie one and likes to run away, dodging and weaving well enough to put a rugby player in awe. Once the little madam was captured, she was marked and placed in a queen cage to keep her safe. With her out of the way, every frame was shaken to remove the bees and every single queen cup (not just swarm cells) was removed.
The hive brood box, full of brood, was then removed from the hive floor and a new brood box, filled with foundation frames, was put in its place. To give the queen some laying room I swapped out some drawn out frames between the brood boxes. The frame lugs from the original brood box have “apv” written on them and foundation frames have “F22” on their lugs to denote that they were foundation frames in 2022.
The queen was released into the new brood box (although she was a bit clingy) and a queen excluder was placed on top to keep her in there.
Two supers, which were already filling up nicely with honey, were placed on top to create the space mentioned earlier.
Another queen excluder was then placed on top of the supers as another layer of defence if the queen managed to wriggle her way through the first one.
Finally, the original brood box was placed at the very top and closed up. It looks like a teetering tower that is around 4-foot-high (including the stand) which is a bit scary for someone vertically challenged like myself.
According to the Demaree Split instructions, you only need to check the top brood box as the bees in there will produce queen cells due to the queen’s smell being too far away for them to realise that they’re not queenless. According to the instructions, the queen and flying bees will think that they’ve swarmed and will draw out all of the foundation frames and the impulse to create swarm cells will have disappeared so there’s no need to check this box for a month or so...
“Bees don’t read books!”
A week after doing this swarm prevention method to all of my strongest hives, I went back to see how they were all getting on. The top boxes, as predicted, had queen cells. I just knocked them all down, no big deal. Out of curiosity I had a nosey at the bottom boxes and found all of them full of queen cells too! I was very perturbed to say the least. I made sure that all queens were still present and knocked all of the cells down before closing the hives up.
After a bit of research, the swarm impulse generally takes a week or so to subside, so the bees probably started these cells immediately after I moved the boxes about and just carried on feeding the larvae, even though the impulse had faded away. It’s been another week since and I’ve only noticed swarm cells in Hive Steph’s bottom brood box. The bees don’t seem to be drawing out the foundation for the queen in that one so she’s quite cramped. I put a few drawn out frames in there to see if that helps the situation. As for the others, the impulse seems to have gone and I have some massive colonies now! Every cloud and all that …
(There were better Gifs for "every cloud has a silver lining" but I saw this and now you have to too)
Here are my thoughts and conclusion about this method:
Pros
An effective method of swarm control
Relatively simple procedure to implement and understand
Only requires an extra single brood box, frames and a queen excluder
Generates big, strong colonies and keeps the entire foraging force together
Cons
Necessary to find the queen
Critical to remove all queen cells at the start and after one week
Generates tall, stacked boxes, so some heavy lifting may be involved
Drones in the top box get trapped by the queen excluder
In a strong flow the bees can backfill the top box with nectar.
Doesn’t always work if the bees don’t produce wax well.
I’ll definitely be using it again in the future, but I think doing it pre-emptively will make it much more effective. I waited until there were swarm cells (granted, it wasn’t my fault) so the impulse had already switched on in the bee’s heads, if I was able to prevent this from happening all together then there would be less trouble. I think I’ll be using more supers in between the brood boxes too; I have a feeling that two boxes just isn’t enough space to stop the queen and flying bees from being able to smell the brood above.
May – Queen Rearing MkII
With all of my hives happily trying to fly off over the horizon, I decided that I would bring this year’s queen rearing attempts forward by a month. Usually this time of year, there aren’t enough drones flying about to mate with any virgin queens, so queen rearing isn’t super successful. Fortunately, due to the aforementioned early warm spring, drones have been about for a few months and are ready to woo some lucky princesses!
Last year’s attempt at artificial queen rearing was a bit of a flop. We tried to queen rear in a nuc with hardly enough bees and we tried to graft for the first time. The bees unhelpfully cleaned out the larvae from the plastic cups we had grafted into. After that pitiful attempt we decided to just create queens using the walk away split method. This worked fine but was a bit hit and miss with the mating and over wintering. 4 of the 7 queens created this way are still going strong though so that’s still a 57% success rate, which is still good.
For Christmas I treated myself to a ‘Nicot Queen Rearing Kit’ which takes my haphazard grafting out of the equation!
As you can see, it comes with a lot of parts! It also, sadly, requires some assembly.
First you have to attach the “Comb Box” to a regular brood frame, via some small screws (annoyingly not included). You then have to carefully place the “Brown Cell Cups” at the back of the comb box in the designated holes. These cups would not stay in for love, nor money; it was an absolute nightmare using these undexterous mitts to fiddle about with tiny brown cups. I found that using some needle nose pliers helped make the process go faster, but when you have to put 120 individual cups in by hand, a needle nose plier doesn’t make it go fast enough. Once they’re in, you place a plastic panel to hold them all in place.
The other side of this “Comb Box” looks kind of like a honeycomb with evenly spaced holes for the queen to lay in. The trick is to place the queen onto this comb side and keep her there via another plastic panel, this one with slots to allow worker bees through to feed ‘Her Madge’. With the queen isolated to this honeycomb panel, it means she is only able to lay into the cell cups. The small, newly hatched larvae can be seen through the transparent back and cups, each in a pinprick of royal jelly.
The harvested eggs should ideally be no more than a few hours old, but it is recommended that they are not more than one day old, they can then be carefully removed and plugged into the cell bar cups.
Once the Queen Cells are drawn and sealed, the roller cages are fitted around them to cage the emerging virgin queens. These cages can then be used for travelling and introduction.
So that is the basic principle anyway. According to the instructions you are supposed to leave the queen in the box for two days, which should give her ample time to lay up the cells.
Once again, “Bees don’t read books!”
I placed queen Jolanta into the box because “she was my most expensive queen from last year so must have the best genetics”. After day 2 when I thought all of the cells were laid up, I went back to check on her. Not one cell had an egg in it! She was still pootling about wondering when she could get back to the proper honeycomb. After doing some googling, I found out they can be reluctant to lay in the plastic and patience was my best weapon.
I left her in there for a whole week in total checking on her every other day. Not a single egg! I gave up in the end and let her loose. I’m going to have to figure out where I went wrong on this one, I seemed to have followed all of the instructions…
With my nicot attempt failing, I sadly searched for my grafting tools again. The Nicot system is genius in thought but with me struggling in practice it has made me think I’ve wasted my money and time. Jolanta is now much weaker after having a week of not laying eggs. I hope she can build up quickly for the summer flow.
I decided to create the cell building colony properly this year. After watching far too many videos online about it by Michael Palmer, Richard Noel, Kaymon Reynolds, Lawrence Edwards, etc. I think I perfected the process.
Hopefully I can explain this clearly to you by going back to the very basic principles and expanding on them. There are only three natural reasons bees make new queens:
Emergency – When the bees are queenless they panic and create a new queen out of a larva within the right age (up to 3 days old). These look like cells randomly placed on the comb, coming out at right angles.
Supersedure – When there is something wrong with the old queen the bees will decide to make a new one. They usually only make one or two cells by either a pre-existing larva or by producing a cell in the middle of the comb and forcing the current queen to lay in it.
Swarm – The hive is too crowded, and the queen is finding it hard to find any empty cells to lay in. the bees make a load of queen cells along the edges and bottom of the comb.
To create the best queens, we need to trigger each queen-rearing response one after another, using the bee’s own natural instincts to work in our favour. It’s much easier to work WITH the bees rather than forcing them to do something unnatural.
The whole queen rearing process takes a long time to complete; I started it all in mid-March, when I stole 11 frames of capped brood from my production colonies and placed them above a queen excluder on Siddy at the allotments. I decided to use Siddy as my queen rearing colony because she seems to be my calmest hive and you need to be a little rough with them during this process.
The reason for the capped brood above Siddy's hive is that a queen rearing colony needs to be absolutely jam packed with bees. As in bees bubbling out of the entrance because it’s so cramped! As mentioned earlier in this post when things get cramped the “swarm instinct” is triggered. We want the bees to feel the need to swarm as this means they are wanting to create as many queen cells as possible. The queen excluder is used to prevent the queen from making her way into the upper brood box. This will make sense in a bit.
After about two weeks, all of the capped brood has emerged and started to fill both boxes to the brim. This is when it’s time to start queen rearing in earnest, as the bees are now super cramped and itching to go flying off over the horizon. Annoyingly, if you have a failure with your nicot system, like me, then your hand is pretty much forced to try another queen rearing method, like grafting, as the bees can’t stay in this condition for long without doing a runner.
The morning of my grafting I prepared the hive by moving the bottom brood box containing the queen to another position, facing the opposite direction. The top brood box was then placed in the original position. This effectively makes the top brood box and the bees within queenless, playing on their other queen rearing trigger, the “emergency” instinct.
The queen excluder not only ensures where the queen is, but it also means that the top box has no eggs or brood on any frame that the bees can use produce a queen cell from. This means that only the grafted larvae that you put in there can be used to create a queen. Generally, this increases the chance of the cells being accepted by the bees and able to be converted into our lovely new queens.
“But Greg…” I hear you ask, “why bother putting the queenright box next door but facing the opposite direction?”
That, dear reader, is because bees will always fly back to their original hive location. We want the queen rearing hive both queenless and so cramped that they feel the need to swarm as well. The flying bees will fly out of Siddy’s hive, go do their job of collecting nectar and pollen and then fly back to their original spot, the queen rearing hive.
After moving the brood boxes about, I left both hives to deal with their new situations. As I was getting into the car, I could hear the panicked roar, that bees make when queenless, start to emanate from the queen rearing hive. “Goooood” I thought in evil contemplation as I drove off. I wanted those bees to be screaming for some larvae to create a queen.
The rest of the day I spent doing inspections and looking for an excellent frame of pollen. I’ve never known so many hives to create so many swarm cells so early in the season! It REALLY slows down the inspection as you have to shake all the bees off every frame and knock down any cell you find (check out the size of this one!). You also have to make some kind of manipulation to subvert their swarm instinct (such as the Demaree split mentioned earlier). Inspections that only usually take 20mins per hive, sometimes turn into well over 40mins… I have 17 hives currently so I can easily lose a day to just inspections. It’s not easy this beekeeping malarkey!
Due to Jolanta being locked in a cage for several days, there wasn’t any frames of young larvae for me to purloin so I had to go to my close “second-best” hive, Bucky. Bucky is a Buckfast queen I bought last year with some wedding money from work. She is so calm and with her hive’s ability to collect honey and produce wax, she was definitely a good choice to rear from. (They’re on 3 supers full of honey already and it's still only spring!)
The best frame to graft from is one with cells of recently emerged larvae surrounded in a ring of cells filled with eggs. The larvae need to be around 2 days old for the grafting process to work. This is where Kat and I fell down last year, we grafted larvae that were too old. So how can we tell if a larva is the right age? It’s relatively simple. On a piece of paper please write:
“Honey is the best natural sweetener for hot drinks, sweets and savoury meals.”
Look at what you wrote closely. The larvae you are looking for are around the size of your comma aka tiny!
I managed to find the perfect frame of larvae in Bucky and replaced it with a foundation frame. As Bucky is at Apiary 2 and the queen rearing hive is at the allotments (10 mins away) I didn’t want the larvae to die from becoming chilled, so I shook a frame of bees in the box with them. Bees will naturally huddle over the young to make sure they are warm and well looked after.
I turned up to the allotments to the loud buzzing coming from inside and outside of the queen rearing hive. Bees were all over the front fanning, releasing as much pheromone to alert any passing queen that they were desperate for a leader. Perfect!
The allotments are genuinely a lovely place to sit about and chat to people. There are plenty of chairs and tables to allow you to do so. I used one of these tables as my little grafting station which brought me some funny looks to say the least. I shook all of the bees from my larvae frame and put it on the table. Next, I retrieved my frames with the plastic grafting cups and placed them on the table too.
Time for grafting!
I’d read online somewhere that you can use a very fine paint brush to graft with. Its softer than the normal tool so there’s less chance of damaging the larva or poking a hole through the back of the cell (which I tend to do a lot). I tried this out for half of the cells. It’s definitely trickier as you have to get the larva to curve over the brush end or it will fall off. The other half I used the traditional “Chinese grafting tool” this went a lot faster. My hands seem to be a bit more dexterous this year, not sure why.
Once all of the plastic cups had a little larva in them, I transported the frames to the cell builder. It was at this point I realised that the noise had attracted a few allotment owners’ attention. “are they swarming?” I was asked. “No” I replied, “they’ll shut up soon enough once I put these frames in”.
I lifted the roof and crownboard and the thunderous roar increased in volume. Yikes…
The grafted cells were placed in carefully and the best pollen frame I could find was placed in between them. The grafted frames have a blue thumbtack and the pollen frame has a yellow one in the video below.
After three days of leaving the bees to it, I went to check how many cells had been accepted if any…
7 out of 16!
Get in!
The ones that weren’t accepted were the larva I transferred via paint brush. Guess that decides which tool I use in future!
“Greg, you grafting genius” I hear from your inner voice “you have only used two of the bee’s natural responses to create your cells, you said you needed all three!”
Well caught on, can tell you are paying great attention to my reflections. After checking which cells have been accepted, I placed the brood box back on top of Siddy with a queen excluder in between. This triggers the "supersedure" response, meaning that the bees aren’t panicking any more, they are queen right again, so now they can calmly and meticulously feed up the queen larvae to become the best “juicy” queens that they can be!
After a week when the cells were all capped, I made up some Nuc’s to put them in. You should find the queens in your donor colonies before you pilfer any frames and shake any bees into the nucs… I did this for the first donor colony (Wembeeley) but it took forever to do as there are so many frames and SO many bees in the colonies currently. Imagine a bucket of 20,000 identical pebbles and there is one ever so slightly longer pointier pebble amongst them. Imagine trying to find that long pebble whilst they’re all moving about… It’s really hard!
I used lots of her frames and bees to make up 3 Nucs as I knew I had her safely stowed in a cage in my pocket. You generally fill a nuc up with two frames of brood and one of food before shaking about 4 frames worth of bees in. As mentioned before, bees will fly back to their original hive so as the Nucs were being used in the same apiary as the donor hive, I needed to shake more bees in than if they were being taken elsewhere. When it came to the second donor colony (garage swarm) I thought “time is getting on… I’m sure if I don’t see the queen on the frame then that will be good enough!” so away I went, finding the frames I wanted to use and checking them for the queen before placing them in the Nuc. I then shook a few frames of bees in too. “What are the chances of the one queen being on the six frames I’ve used out of a hive containing twenty? Slim to none!” I thought… (see this? This is what we call foreboding…)
I made up two more nucs and set them all up on the stand at the back of the plot. Every Nuc was given a sealed queen cell and closed up. “Joooob done” I congratulated myself.
“Hmm Garage swarm is making a funny noise” I said to myself as I pootled off in my car to go spend some time with my wife.
A few days later I was unable to sleep, and I realised that something may have happened to garage swarm when I was shaking bees out to cause them to roar. After work I went back to the allotments and opened up the hive… Emergency queen cells everywhere… “oh poo.” I uttered in realisation.
I went to the two nucs I made up from her and opened them up. The first Nuc was fine, the queen cell still hadn’t hatched so I closed it back up. The second Nuc had freshly laid eggs and a very perplexed queen bee wandering around in her much smaller home. I went to check on the sealed queen cell and it had been dismantled. I swore at this point. This was a learning experience for me, always find the queen first in donor colonies!
It's actually worked in my favour as I was going to do another round of queen rearing as I’m wanting to put some queens up for sale soon, along with these Nucleus Colonies. As the Garage swarm hive is now queenless, I can use it for the next batch. This time I’m going to use the larvae from Carni (the Carniolan) for my queens. She’s doing great.
Anyway, there you have it. The trials and tribulations of queen rearing. I’m getting better but it’s not exactly a well-oiled machine yet. Maybe this next batch will go better.
Hope you’re all safe and well
Greg
P.S. Queens and Nucs to be ready for sale from June onwards!
P.P.S. My second attempt at grafting (with Carni’s larvae this time) has produced 14 out of 21 queen cells! Woop woop!! Let’s see if we can get these girls in Nucs and mated asap =)
P.P.S.S. Here is the first of my Virgin Queens emerging!
Now Mated and Marked with this years colour - Yellow: