Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
the hive. A few days later she will commence laying eggs, and you will have a mated
queen to sell, to build the nuc into a colony or to re-queen another hive.
The Miller method: a summary
Before you begin, choose a colony with good characteristic (e.g. gentleness, low
swarming, superseding, adequate honey yields, etc.):
Day 1
: make the Miller frame from good foundation wax and place this into a full
and queen-less nuc/hive or a hive with a queen excluder.
Day 6
: prepare your queenless cell-building nucs or queenless hive.
Day 7
: remove your Miller frame, trim the edges back to the little comma-shaped
larvae and place the frame into the centre of the queenless hive/nuc, which will act
as the developer hive.
Day 16
: if you are going a step further to rear mated queens, prepare your
queenless nucs ready to receive one queen cell. Move them to another apiary, block
their entrances with grass or place them in a circle around the original hive.
Day 17
: carefully cut out the developed queen cells from the Miller frame and use
these to re-queen your hives, sell them or place them in the prepared mating nucs
described in the previous point.
The
advantages
of this method are that it is low tech and needs no equipment other than
hives and/or nucs. You can also raise a good number of queens from it. Once you have
removed the Miller frame full of eggs and young larvae from the starter hive, you can
put in another frame to start the process again. In this way, you can keep on producing
good queens according to a controlled plan, with no need to graft the larvae.
The swarm box method
(Larval transfer necessary.) This is probably the most extensively employed queen-
rearing method, especially by serious queen rearers. It is not compatible with the
let-alone method of larval presentation because you need to graft some larvae yourself
or use a queen-rearing kit, such as the Jenter or Cuckpit, to prepare the larvae. This
method is, however, suitable for continuous production.
