Controlled Queen Rearing to Raise European Honey Bee (EHB) Queens

The obvious question, "Why not rear your own queens?"

Why?--Why not

• Failing queens.
• Additional colonies to be created.
• Stock improvement.
• Replacement queens for other beekeepers.
• Save money for other items like bee equipment.

There are three critical essentials to raising 1 or 100 queens

• Rearing – a queen larva needs to receive a large amount of quality feed.
• Selecting – queens ONLY from colonies with desirable traits.
• Mating – improve the odds that reared queens will mate with drones from hives of desirable traits.

Controlled Queen rearing has 3 parts to the operation

• Preparation – getting the cell raising colony in the right condition to raise the queens.
• Cell raising – raising the cells you want.
• Completion – making nuclei, installing the cells and re-uniting the colony.

Controlled Queen rearing is one of the key skills in becoming a better beekeeper 

• choosing a good breeder colony
• grafting larvae to raise queen cells
• rearing queen cells and drones
• managing queen rearing nucleus hives
• basic biology of caste determination and mating

For beekeepers who have mastered basic hive management and who want to learn how to rear their own queens. Main qualifications are genuine interest and basic beekeeping experience.

Below is a table I created in MS Excel that outlines the EHB-Queen stages of development. Remember to harvest sealed cells at the 11th day from when the larvae were grafted. Otherwise, queens emerge and you have a problem on your hands.

Click here, if you'd like a copy of this table to print for your own use.

Why you can raise your own queens for use and also sell them.

A local queen breeder has the following advantages:

• Reputation among local beekeepers
• Queens face no stress in shipping in the mail
• Immediate follow-up with queen problems
• Feedback from your friends  or customers will tell you, if you are on the right path or not.

A well bred queen -- one that lays well and produces a lot of brood.

A queen that produces gentle bees -- Aggressive bees are not fun.

A honey queen: greater honey production from her bees—.

 A queen should be disease resistant, mite resistant, and anything else resistant.

Once a virgin queen emerges from her cell, she will destroy other cells from, which queens have not yet emerged.  If there are other queens in the cell builder colony, they will find each other and fight until there is only one left.

The virgin queen will mate usually within 5 days of emerging and begin to lay eggs usually within 10 days after emerging.  However, it may vary a bit due to weather conditions.  Researchers point out that virgin queens mate more than once and that usually between 12 to 20 mating occur with an average of about 15.  Thus, one needs a large drone population for young virgin queens. A good strong healthy hive may have between 300 and 800 drones at peak periods.

I like drones. I encourage the drone-rearing in my hives by providing a limited opportunity for the bees to make drone comb. To do this, I remove one deep frame and replace it with a shallow frame in the 2nd, 3rd or 7th, 8th frame setting-on the edge of the brood nest.

I over-winter my deeps in Northeastern Kansas with a full 10 frame count. I use 9 frames in my honey supers.  My experience since 1999 has shown that the bee colonies WANT drones.

If a colony is not provided with the opportunity to build drone comb, they will build excess burr comb to make drones in the hive between the frames as well as as on frame bottoms and in any space available.  Besides, if you are not creating an opportunity for plentiful, healthy, strong drones from your own proven stock, just whose drones will be mating with your queen(s)? 

Marla and Gary say we should re-think drones as  "studs".  There have been other studies that show bee make more honey when drones are around. Guess it's because drones eat more? 

It's important to spend time looking through colonies, deciding on quality, desirable traits to perpetuate.

I've gotten rather skillful at grafting those tiny, young larva for queen rearing.

Beautifully sealed worker brood in the pupa stage. This pattern indicates a well mated queen and diversity in mating.

Recommended Manual:

Successful Queen Rearing Manual
Spivak, M.; Reuter, G.

Price: $ 15.00

Results in May 2007.

In spite of severe set backs due to unseasonably cold and extended freezing weather during the 1st few weeks in April, I'm finally experiencing the results of my queen rearing.  I had selected larvae from 3 different hives, which had exhibited a number of the desired characteristics I had been looking to propagate.  At the top of my desires is honey production; I was also really keen on a couple of other desired exhibited behaviors from hives whose bees had been extremely gentle to work with and also had excellent winter storage.

From hive #1, my most important quality was gentleness.  Mean bees are no fun! Why have them around?

From Hive #2, it was the way these bees have packed food stores and over-wintered now for several years.

From hive #3, I was looking at race. I don't have any pure Italian hives, so 1/3 of the larvae I grafted came from Italian bees -from a hive that I've been taking care of for several years now.

Of all the desired traits, honey production is at the top my list.  I'm also looking at gentleness,  and better packing for surviving our Kansas' winters.  Finally, my hive populations are a real mixture but seem predominantly Carniolan, Italian, residual Buckfast, SMR, hygenic and a few other varieties of queens that I cannot remember, which I have bought and that have survived and mixed during the last 7 years.  About 1/3rd of the queen larvae that I grafted were of the Italian (Apis Mellifera --the common western honey bee -Ligustica or Italian) race.  I grafted nearly 60 larvae and had 50+ mature cells to use for split-making and re-queening.

Picture #1 (below) taken May 26, 2007 showing marked queen (this year's marking color being yellow). What I consider success.

Isn't she sexy?

I am impressed. It has been a very long time since I have seen this kind of brood pattern as this (below), filled nearly side-to-side and top-to bottom with very little 'blanks'.  I checked 16 hives today and nearly all have this superb laying pattern. What have been missing all these years?  :-) So far, it's been a wonderful success. It will take more time to see if the other desired improvements take hold.

Bottom line is that I am thrilled!  This will go a long way toward stock improvement and additional colonies.  An amazing benefit I've already experienced this year is swarm control--that's because I split nearly every hive that I had. If they were in preparation for swarming, I did not hesitate to split that hive down as I had queens waiting for homes. As a result, I a have a shortage of bottom boards and lids---yep, running out of equipment.

As previously stated above, my goals for 2008:  1) Looking for hatch time around April 15th., 2) Supply a few beek friends and club members with queens, 3) teach others my experience, and 4 expand my nucs by at least 10.