Queen Rearing Overview at BeeWeaver Honey Farm

One of the underrated aspects of producing high quality

queen

s is selecting breeders that have the traits you want to propagate and that you would like to see in the next generation and that is one of the things I enjoy most about the job is identifying colonies that have traits and qualities. higher and use them as sources of material for later generations, both for the

queen

s, that is, colonies to first graft onto star larvae to start the queen cells, and also, and this is something that many people overlook , you also want to be doing the same thing on the drone side, so you want to have high quality colonies that produce drones that your queens will mate with now is both an art and a science in a sense, because it depends on what traits you are looking for the right thing and the more complicated you make your selection criteria, the harder it will be to find queens to whom you can confidently assign responsibility for a colony's temperament,

honey

production, mite tolerance, resistance to viruses, whatever you want to select, so it's easy what I'm trying to say is that it's easy to make mistakes and fool yourself into thinking that you have breeding queens that exhibit all the characteristics you want unless you've rigorously evaluated them over a long period of time. period of time, so one of what we try to do is try to group colonies after the first year that have performed exceptionally and evaluate them over the next year to make sure that the signs and signals that we thought we were seeing after the first year of that queen who head a colony are also present the following year and that there was not something that happened by chance that caused those colonies to appear to be something other than what they were, or that they produced more

honey

because they were in the northeast corner of the beekeeper and all the nectar sources were to the northeast, so that colony picked up foragers who got lost or tired on the way home and got more than their fair share in free contributions from bees belonging to others. colonies that happens all the time or something else, whether that colony mysteriously miraculously escaped could be an infestation, for example, and was not exposed to mite parasitism to the same intensity as other colonies in the beekeeper and, consequently, may testing them to be superior when it comes to mite tolerance when, in fact, the only thing that really happened was that they didn't have a mite infestation of any appreciable level, so the other thing we like to do is put our colonies in tests where we actively expose them. turn them into mites and then evaluate how they respond to that infestation, so that's another thing we do that's a little more formal and beyond the scope of what we're going to talk about today, but suffice it to say that if you're raising queens , the first and most important consideration is to find colonies that exhibit the traits that you want to maintain, propagate and expand in your colonies or in your clients' colonies and that's all from a theoretical perspective, I mean, it's that simple, but it is That's tricky too, the more traits you try to select at the same time the harder it gets, so I always suggest to people who are just starting to raise queens to focus on one thing and try to do it and don't get confused. with trying to select too many things at once, at least until you have a sustainable population that you can work with that has the trait that interests you most, so if you are looking for honey production, focus on honey production if your ac, if your main goal is gentleness then focus on that, if you try to do too much at once it will take you longer, you will make more mistakes and you will see less progress so, a highlight.

An example of that is our struggle and trials to develop a population of bees and that is important, let me digress ultimately if you are going to be good at the rear and you are going to have to have a population that you can select. not just a handful of colonies, so one of the things we struggled with early in our efforts to find and maintain a bee population that would tolerate varroa mites is making sure we correctly identified those colonies and observed their progeny. We evaluated the performance of their progeny so that we could know whether we were progressing or not and we focused on that almost to the exclusion of everything else, now one of the things that was perhaps beneficial but certainly was a particularly challenging problem for us.

During that time period and I'm talking about the early 90's and late 90's, Africanized bees were widely present in Texas at that time and dominated the wild population and the wild population density is higher than most. people appreciate, consequently, we had problems with failed matings. We had our queens fly and mate with drones from African colonies in the new world and as a consequence our bees, although they became more force tolerant as we wanted and that was our main goal, they also became more defensive than we wanted and that just seemed to come with the territory in those days despite our best efforts to constantly re-clean and remove colonies that were exhibiting hyper defensive behavior, we still sometimes ran into that and had overall a population that was more defensive than earlier and more defensive than we wanted, we wanted to work on that, but we didn't want to focus all of our energies on trying to restrict or reduce defensive behavior in our population until we had widespread penetrance for varroa tolerance or mite resistance, so to speak.

We wanted to, so it wasn't until the late '90s that we were really able to shift our attention away from mite resistance or varroa tolerance and suppressing defensive behavior. We were able to do it, but we had to do it sequentially or at least that's what I did because it made the problem more manageable, if you agree, so this is a little introduction to what you should think about when starting to raise queens . Now we will look at some of the things that go into raising queens and We are going to start with the grafting and that is to first remove the star larva from the breeding colonies that we have selected and physically transfer those larvae from the first stage of the comb from the breeding colony to queen cell cups which are then placed in queenless cells. units to start the queen cells, so now I'm going to turn the program over to Roosevelt Roberson, who is a fascinating guy, one of my favorite human beings, and I think it's equally important that he was my father's right-hand man, Benford Weaver, when I was small. child and was taught by the best as was I and he is without a doubt one of the best beekeepers in the world so let's follow Roosevelt as he goes through the process of extracting graft larvae from breeding queens and taking them to our very talented women who then they do the grafts.

Hello Roosevelt, I was telling the audience that one of the things I really appreciate about you is that you learned beekeeping from my father and it's no wonder that you are one of the best beekeepers in the world because you learned from the best I have to say amen to that and not only that but when I was a little kid and I was just starting out with bees when my dad wasn't around to help me understand more about how to manage The colonies also guess who was good, so I'll learn from you too, okay? So, Roosevelt, I was just telling you about selecting breeders and now I'm going to let you show you how we extract the graft larva and get it to the women to get started.

The queen

rearing

process is fine, so if you could explain what you do and how you do it and anything else that occurs to you while you are extracting the grafton larva, well, okay, then we go into the hive and we have to smoking in the entrance. We're good and then we slowly open up once we look for the lava law, which we generally want to be a certain age, probably around 72 hours, but we can always give them the hatch for the queen to come out. us on a certain date now man, today we don't have sun, it would be more appropriate, we had sun, but today it was cloudy, but look, can we find good lava of the right age that we really liked?

Well, sometimes one day we go and find real larvae. fast and some days we can't, sometimes like I say, some days we can't get there, we might have something here, okay, we might have something here in this frame, so we'll take it to the ladies and let them they submit. the light and they can tell me what to do, how do I have the right size or not? Okay, so we'll take this inside. Hi Billy, I want you to look at this and see. I hope you can find some here. Okay, now these are. the one we caught yesterday we have to let them stay in at least 20 24 hours before we can give them a good start, so we're going to remove them and move them to a final maximum that is above the excluded one. but anyway we're going to see how well they started to get off to a good start so try to get some bees out now we're off to a good start perfect perfect stars here if you can see all the little bumps at the end let me know what they had a good start everywhere be well fed with royal jelly okay yeah I'm very happy with the start of these here and then almost everyone has almost started if you can we can have a good finish almost every one of these candles she's going to be a queen so the gofo frame was a really good start when you see all these bees grouped together like that here that's what they're really feeding on are they really feeding that lava that's a dojo queen that's it what they really try.

What they have to do is raise themselves for a queen because every hive knows that they are supposed to have a queen, so they go to work trying to raise themselves for a queen. Now we have all these little candles and what we're going to do now is we're going to bring Take out those frames and put them here and leave them there for 24 hours and then we'll take them out. This is kind of like in our season, our sales are not as many as we normally would like because like this is the season, everything is that the bees are slowing down, they know when it's time to slow down, so right now they are They're slowing down, thank you, okay, so we put these on the ones that just grabbed it and they'll be here 24 hours. and we will be, we may not be able to move them out tomorrow, but we will move them out on Monday morning.

Now we always like to give them fine syrup as long as they can feed, you can go ahead and feed it, feed your grass, okay? We will cover them again and not bother them again until Monday. Okay, one of the things you want to keep in mind when you're raising queens is that you want to try to lay the colonies that you're going to raise. queen cells in good locations where they have abundant floral resources, lots of pollen and, to the extent possible, nectar. This is an example of a good place to raise queens, especially in the fall, we have a couple of plants around us that are key. we have the aster which will provide a source of nectar, we have the broom which is a good source of pollen and you can see that this grass is full of this stuff so these bees will do better than other colonies and other parts of the world nearby that don't have those floral resources, so that's always something you want to keep in mind when you're choosing places to put your bees in the back queen cells, so the way we do it is by finishing the queen cells up. an excluder in a colony that is two stories or two and a half stories and we work with young broods, that is, we take young broods from the bottom where the queens can find them above the excluder and we place the queen cells between them. brood combs, so as you can see here, we have young broods in the center of that comb surrounded by honey, same thing on this side, and here are the actual cells that were dropped today a few hours ago so that you can see that They have a little wax on them and they have been fed royal jelly and over the next 24 to 36 hours you will see more and more royal jelly build up at the bottom of these cell vessels as they are supplied by the nurse bees and that is why by which you raise young brood because it attracts the nurse bees out of the colony above the excluder where they will be to care for the queen cells.

Thanks, sometimes our self-finishing colonies can become more defensive than other hives because they feel queenless at the top, they are able to sense that they don't have a queen on top of that excluder, which is why they continue to feed the baby cells that they have moved in even though the colony is queen, we have bees that are raising bees on top of the excluder that feel queenless and so they are going to continue feeding royal jelly to those queen cells that we have moved into, okay, now We are in the last step. the process and that is we're going to go through the mating nukes where we introduced a mature queen cell two weeks or more ago and that queen emerged from the queen cell had the opportunity to fly and mate and then go back to the nuke and we started to lay eggs, we only catch queens thatThey are lame, so we have to make sure, if we work with these nukes, that we see eggs before we capture the queen and put her in the cage and the other part of the program that we are going to talk about and examine today about the cycle through the nuke queen which makes her productive for one more time, one more queen and the way we do that is after we have captured the queen off the nuke we go to.

To introduce a mature queen cell back into the nuclear bomb so that the process can start again and this young queen can emerge mature, fly and mate, return to the nuclear bomb and start laying eggs, one of the important things to do is do is make sure that our queen cells are viable, so what I did was I went into one of the queen cells and examined the developing almost mature queen. There she is and did you detect that movement? There is a little movement. You see? she kicking her legs so we want to make sure that our queens are viable and that they are almost mature so these are 10 day old cells, almost 11 and we have to put them in the nukes quickly because these queens are about to hatch. or close or emerge, this is what an almost mature queen looks like, she has full wings, she is starting to get pigmentation, her legs are ready and active, she is almost done, well pink guy, why don't you tell us about trapping queens ?

I have it, yes, it's okay. so these are cut out and marked, explain what you're doing, I'm going to cut them out, mark this queen, so cut a wing on one side and then mark it like this, it's just a paint, it's letting the blue paint dry from the paint a pen and she will put the queen in the cage. Now sometimes we trap queens with bees in them because that queen will be shipped and we want you to assist with it, yes other times we will trap a lot of queens without bees and store them that way and then ship them to customers in battery boxes or in big lots of cages in a separate miniature box with bees surrounding them.

We are surrounding the queens, that is, seven bees. We've caught queens with these nukes. And then the final step to start the process again for one more cycle is to put a mature queen cell into that nuclear bomb. Anita will show us how she does it with very secure hands, she has to secure that there, press it a little. Well, that's all there is to it, so this nuclear queen will have the opportunity to raise one more queen before the end of the year. We want to finish trapping queens around Halloween and then we'll start again.

We have people. those who order the queens come through our website, then we have a program that just shows your name, I go to it and print your label, we ship everything via express express mail, we print it once it's printed, it's a really simple process and we put it. In this envelope we always send a beekeeper's guide so that people know if they have never reigned again and then they will know what to do. We have three different types of queens that we ship. This is a marching queen. One point means she has. it's just been marked, you'll see the blue dot on it and then cleptomart the two lines mean it's been clipped and marked and then what that means is one wing has been clipped so it can't fly, take the queen, put it on and then seal it and send it and as you can see we have holes in the envelope so the bees can get fresh air and then it takes about two days so we have tried to give you a brief

overview

of various aspects of queen

rearing

.

We didn't really have time to delve into any particular step, but I hope this was a helpful

overview

of how we do it and I encourage you to give it a try, if nothing else, it will make you a much better beekeeper and you will gain a greater appreciation for the value of queens and what the process entails once you've tried doing it yourself. We've had a really good year this year. I must say that we feel very blessed with the way the year started. Without an almost unheard of spring honey flow in this part of Texas, it didn't look like we would be able to raise many queens, but things changed quickly and this has been one of the best queen rearing years we have ever had.

We have long produced tens of thousands of queens this year and hope to do so again next year.