Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Queen rearing is in four parts, as follows. First, you prepare the larvae for presentation
to the queen-rearing units. This involves letting the bees choose their own larvae or
grafting larvae about 24 hours old from your chosen colony into either plastic or
homemade wax cells. Alternatively, you could use a queen-rearing kit whereby the
queen is trapped in a cage on a comb where she lays her eggs into prepared plastic cells.
These eggs are subsequently removed and presented to a queen-rearing unit.
The next stage comprises preparing queen-rearing units to receive the selected larvae.
These units are strong colonies from which the queen has been removed or has been
separated from the queen-rearing part of the hive by a queen excluder. Next, you
transfer the resulting queens/queen cells to the receiving hives/nuclei, from where they
fly and mate. Finally, the mated queen(s) are placed in a queenless nucleus or hive ready
to begin work as the colony's queen.
To take the first point, in most fully controlled, queen-rearing operations, the beekeeper
selects larvae from their chosen colony, puts them into plastic or homemade wax cells
and then places a frame bar hanging downwards (as nature intended) on them in a
queenless colony that is rich in nurse bees. Because the bees are queenless they will
recognize these cells as 'queen cups' and will draw them out into queen cells while, at
the same time, feeding and nurturing the larvae within them. After a few days, you will
find a neat row of queen cells hanging there. You know where they came from, and you
know their exact age.
While there are excellent methods of rearing queens that do not require the larvae to be
transferred from their original cells to small, artificial queen cups, should you decide to
employ the swarm box system of queen rearing described later in this chapter, you will
need to know the rules for transferring the larvae into queen cups.
