#5 Raising Your Own Queens and Making Nucs taught by Grant Gillard at the Great Plains Growers Conference in St. Joseph, Missouri on 2020-01-09

1. #5
“Raising Queens and Making Nucs.”
Why? …and how?
Grant Gillard

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Great Plains Growers Conference
Grant Gillard 2020-01-09

4. Why?
“Nothing will make a bigger difference in your
beekeeping than high quality queens.”

5. Queen Rearing is Simple
1. Create a queenless colony
(as simple as removing the queen)
2. Colony should have
--a large population of young, nurse bees
--ample stores of pollen and nectar

7. Queen Rearing is Simple
Nurse bees then
1. feed worker larvae copious
amounts of royal jelly and
2. reconstruct the cell to hang
vertically
Worker matures to a higher level (queen)

10. Why Raise Your Own?
Availability
Quality
Cost
Introduction issues with mail-order
(caged and banked) mated queens

13. Best Time To Raise Queens
Swarm season
Generous nectar flow
Abundant pollen
Strong colony (cell builder) of
healthy nurse bees

14. Timeline for queens
3-1/2 days egg
5-1/2 days larva
7 days pupa
Day 16 queen hatches
5-7 days harden, mate
3-5 days mature, lay eggs
24 – 28 days to production

15. 6 Methods
1. The Doolittle Method
2. The Procrastinator’s Method
3. The “I Just” Method
4. The “I’ll Let” Method
5. The NICOT Queen Rearing Kit
6. The Five-Minute Queen Method

16. 1. The Doolittle Method
Graft (remove) day-old larvae (day 4) to
a cell cup
Place cell cups (grafts) in a queenless
cell starter for 48 hours
Move cell cups to a queen-right
cell finisher for 4 to 9 days
Place capped cells in mating nucs
(Day 10 - 15)

17. Cory Stevens stevensbeeco.com

18. Advantages
Can be started anytime
Cuts 4 days off the process
Large quantities of queens can
be raised

19. Disadvantages
Can you identify day-old larvae?
Can you graft without damaging
the larvae?
Need --good eye sight
--a steady hand
--excellent lighting

21. 2. Procrastinator’s Method
 Ignore colonies and trigger the impulse to
swarm (but when?)
 Hope to catch swarm as it leaves (when
cells are capped)
 Hope queen cells are evenly distributed
among the frames.
 Divide frames with swarm cells into nucs.

22. 3. The “I just” method
“I just” pulled two frames of brood and
put them in a nuc. Nuc is queenless.
But we expect a weak, under-resourced
nuc make fantastic queen cells.
Not completely impossible to get a
good queen.

23. 4. “I’ll let” method
“I’ll let my bees decide when they need
a new queen.”
Run down colonies burdened with low
morale hope to make a queen.
Lost production waiting

24. 5. NICOT queen rearing kit
Kit costs around $80
Cell grid – where the queen is confined
to lay eggs
Cell cups – where eggs laid
Cell cup holders, cell cup fixtures –
fasten cell cups to top bars

28. NICOT Process
Place the empty cell grid (no
queen) between two brood
frames to “warm up.”
Leave in for 24 to 48 hours.

29. NICOT Process
Put the front on the cell grid
Find the queen, and place her in
the cell grid
Wait 4 days to see if you see eggs.
Queen may not lay on the first day.

31. NICOT Benefits
Graft cell cups w/o touching larvae
Very easy to detect day-old larvae

32. NICOT Process
Move (“graft”) cell cups with
larvae to a frame (cell cup
holders/fixtures)
Install frame into cell starter
and builder

35. NICOT Disadvantages
Takes longer
2 days to warm up
2 days for fickle queen
Four cell starters per batch, all one
day behind the other
Restraining queen

36. NICOT Disadvantages
110 cells cups, and queen won’t lay
in all of them
Must graft larvae, not eggs
60-70 larvae hatch
40-50 queen cells capped
30-40 queens mated

37. 6. Five-Minute Method
Build up a colony to a minimum of
8 frames of brood
Expand brood nest to prevent
swarming
Make a “reverse split” (nuc) with
the queen, two frames of brood and
bees

39. What just happened?
A fully-resourced, queenless
colony begins to make queen
cells from age-appropriate
larvae.
Do you trust the bees to choose
the larvae?

40. Return 7 days later
Expect to find capped queen
cells…now what?
Option 1
Squish all but two queen cells
and super for honey production

41. Return 7 days later
Option 2
Divide the frames with queen
cells between nuc boxes,
allocating frames with cells
between them.
Squish all but two cells per nuc

44. Return 21 days later
Confirm queen mated by
observing pearly white brood

45. How’s this work?
Bees do all the heavy lifting
Requires a minimal amount of
time from the beekeeper
Allows for weather disruptions
Limit to 4 to 5 nucs per existing
hive.

46. Five-Minute Method
Remove queen, reverse split
Return 7 days later, squish all
but two cells
Return 21 days later to confirm
mated, laying queen
Virtually goof-proof