Queen Rearing Basics
John Gates, began beekeeping in 1975 here in the Shuswap. The interest of in beekeeping at that time reflects the interest similar to today. Instrumental insemination and breeding programs were taking off and making new ground. John mentored under BC provincial apiculturalist John Corner In 1975 Gates took the role of regional inspector and 20 years later became the provincial research apiculturalist of BC.
Typical practice in BC was to kill bees off in the winter, around 79-80 Gates began a 3 years of a research of a breeding program looking in to bees that would overwinter here in BC. After 3 years they produced productive, winter hearty, and gentle queens and they began selling the queens back in to the US. By 1981 the queen rearing program turned in to a seminar based program launching the queen rearing program started in BC. In that time, Gates had a chance to work with Dr Harry Laidlaw and Steve Taylor.
Gates current stock has been breeding since the early 80s and has only had 2 introductions in to his stock since then. Some of that stock was carneolin from Hastings in Saskachewan and the other was Russian bees brought in a few years (only 1 colony from that stock was selected for his program. The queen rearing course taught this weekend is focussed on commercial style QR course and also a mini-beekeeping course. He doesn’t feel that you can do a course without that review. The colony must be feeling queenless for a minimum of 4 hours before they will take a graft. Below is the information A.B.C gained from the attending the Queen Rearing Workshop at Sweetacre Apiaries in Tappen, BC on June 9-10th, 2012.
Rearing Queens
Q: what is the most successful QR method?
Q: How do you feel about the queens that come from a swarm?
Q: what is the lifecycle of the queen and why is it important for a young egg needed?
Q: How long until the queen must mate after emergence to be viable?
Q: What is the difference between workers, drone, and queens?
Q: what is an inter-cast queen?
Q: How can you tell the difference between swarms and supersede queen cells?
Q: How do you ensure that the hive pulls wax?
Q: Where is the best place the set up a mating nucs?
Q: What is the weather conditions needed for mating?
Q: What is the timing for the Queen Rearing schedule?
Q: When should you consider queen rearing in your area?
Q: How do you use grafting and cloaking boards to commercially raise queen cells?
Q: What should I know about incubator colonies in the cloak board method?
Q: How do you start your season?
Q: What is the allowable mite load/mite wash to be able to sell the bees inter-provincially?
Q: What is the average price for a nuc sold out of BC today? Average price per queen?
Q: How do you make candy for the queen cages?
Q: How do you feel about drone comb?
Transporting queen cells
Q: What do you transport your queen cells in?
Q: What should I consider for my bee yards for mating nuc development?
Q: How do you raise drones? Why is it important?
Making Nucs for sale
Q: What is your spring management practice?
Q: What should I consider for my bee yards for mating nuc development?
Q: How do you re-queen colonies in the spring with the TOPS method?
Q: How do you make nucs in the spring with the TOPS method?
Q: What is a best colony, according to John Gates, to breed from?
FAQ
A: emergency, supersedure, and swarm.
Emergency: queen is killed somehow: rolled by beekeeper, bear, woodpecker, fallen tree etc. They can be good and they can be bad. The bees may just choose a whole bunch of different aged larva to use, so the oldest larva will hatch out first, be imperfect and she can sting and kill the other queens.
Supersedure: Old queen comes to the end of her life, lack of pheromone, poor laying practice, so they decide to raise a replacement and selection tends to be the best producing better queens because of the lack of pressure to produce and the old queen tends not to compete or fight with the other queen. This is when you can see more than one queen in a colony.
Swarm: The colony is overcrowded, hot, and the bees split off. This is a natural way for bee colonies to reproduce. Those queens are usually excellent queens, but the problem with producing stock from swarm cells is that you will be choosing from stock that likes to swarm. There was a time when the bees would swarm all the time and making it challenging to beekeepers to keep their queens. So now, producing queens from supersedure conditions will deplete the swarming behaviour. There is a genetic basis to swarming. So, do not produce splits or queens from swarm cells.
Q: what is the most successful QR method?
A: using all of the events above, primarily emergency and supersedure. We are going to make the bees feel queen-less quickly, but to ensure that the bees rear queens from young eggs/larva, we will graft.
A: Lots of quality feed and lots of young bees. Young bees produce the royal jelly to produce the queens and they need a lot of pollen and honey to ensure proper nutrition. Gates also likes to feed a thin sugar syrup (1:1)because the bees pull honey during a honey-flow. Thick sugar syrup will plug the colony up and store it too quick. If you are QR without a nectar flow, you will have to feed to ensure the sufficient amount of wax is needed to build the queen. Pollen is best if it is natural, or you can use Bee-Pro (a yeast and soy protein mixture) with sugar and honey to mix in to a patty. Gates will feed this 10 days before beginning QR.
Q: How do you feel about the queens that come from a swarm?
A: The queens are strong enough to get the colony started, but tend to fail. So it is a good idea to requeen if possible before the coming winter to ensure the bees survive.
Q: What is the lifecycle of the queen and why is it important for a young egg needed?
A: Queen 0-16 to hatch out.
Egg: 0-3 days
Larva: 3-9 days (only 6 days of nutrition to ensure that the queen becomes a queen and not a worker).
Pupation: 7 days
A: spermatheca and ovaries are fully intact. Some argue that 4million sperm is a poorly mated queen, but there are arguments and events that prove different.
Q: How long until the queen must mate after emergence to be viable?
A: Gates had 28 days of rain after emergence and the queen viably mated. A lot of commercial queens (mostly USA) the queens are not properly raised; not fed, not enough drones, and artificial insemination, find that the queens are smaller and weak and supersede within the summer. So, it is best to concern yourself with feeding and quality production then to concern yourself with the timeline of mating.
Q: What is the difference between workers, drone, and queens?
A: All eggs in teh ovary can be all of the bees. The egg has one set of chromosomes (16 chromosomes/ set). If the egg, as it passes the spermatheca, becomes inseminated, it can be both a queen or a worker. If it is to become a queen, it must be fed a greater quantity of food and greater quality of food.
Q: what is an inter-cast queen?
A: a queen produced from an older egg/larva making the queen have less ova and producing less workers and a slower rate. She will usually be supersceded, but the fear is that this may happen late in the season and the new queen may not ready the hive for winter.
Q: How can you tell the difference between swarms and superseded?
A: Swarms: Lots of cells found mostly at the bottom of the cell, there is a lot of bees, you comb (that is pulled, potential comb locations do NOT count as space/room) and you have a look at the queen and she is fat and there is an abundance of worker bees at various levels of development.
Supersedure: There are LESS queen cells, and they tend to be found on the face of the comb. You can see the queen, she isn’t fed so she will be small and won’t be lying.
Q: How do you ensure that the hive pulls wax?
A: If you want the bees to pull wax, you should feed with a 1:1 syrup feed to emulate a nectar flow. Feeding with a frame feeder, even with the float, the older bees tend to die. Using frame feeders should be used for emergency feeding and fall feeding. It is best to feed during queen rearing slow, long term feeding, so that they don’t eat to quick and react to the loss of feed as a dirth and chew back the queen cells. As well, feeding quick and hard can make the bees over-store honey and clog up the cells.
Q: Where is the best place the set up a mating nucs?
A: Weak nectar flow somewhere hot and dry so that the nucs don’t become clogged with honey. These hives can be fat combed and there is a high chance of rolling the queen and boxes heavy with honey can make the colony lose room for that new queen to lay once she is mated.
Q: What is the weather conditions needed for mating?
A: 2-3 days in a row of over 20 degrees Celsius. Queens can go out on multiple mating flights until a quality mating is made. The days over that temperature, you want the weather to be calm to ensure that the queens don’t drift in to other colonies. Try to mate in a low wind area: will, banked against trees, gravel pit, S facing part of the way down a valley etc. Keep in mind that the elevation can change the average temperature for mating. Gates did mating usually over 5000ft to ensure isolation, but made sure that the mating was taking place during the summer so that the daytime temperatures are being met to ensure the queens are mating properly.
Q: What is the timing for the Queen Rearing schedule?
A: Know that this schedule is not flexable! If you don’t follow this schedule, you will fail in your QR.
Graft/natural cell: 1 day old larva = 4 day old bee
Cells ripe- 10 days after graft = 14 day old bee
Cells hatch- 11.5-12 days after graft = 15.5-16
Q: When should you consider queen rearing in your area?
A: Have a look at the temperature records for your area ensuring your schedule works around your virgins hatch during 20 degree Celsius weather to ensure timely mating.
Q: How do you use grafting and cloaking boards to commercially raise queen cells?
Using a cloak board with grafting
Needs:
- Special QX cloaking board with a tin cover.
- A strong 2 box colony
- Pollen and honey stores in frames
- Frames with old and young brood
- Slow feeders and pollen patties
- Bottom board
- Grafting frame
- Chinese grafting tool
- Plastic queen cups.
FYI: must do your grafting within 2 days if inserting cloak board because you want to be sure that you are grafting from the TOP BOX of bees with bees younger than 3 days to ensure proper nutrition.
Step 1: Day1- 4 day old queen Have your cloak board w queen excluder and insert it between the 2 boxes and make sure your queen is in the bottom box either by seeing her or by shaking all of the bees in the bottom box.
Step 2: Day 1- 4 day old queen Make sure that you move your eggs and really young bees up and the older brood down. Place frames of pollen and honey side by side to the young frames to ensure that the food is closest to the eggs to ensure that they are being properly fed.
Step 3: Day 1- 4 day old queen Turn your hive 180 degrees and close the entrance. The bees will now enter through the space created by the cloaking board and in order to go down to the bottom box, will have to wiggle through the QX. This makes sure that the bees coming in are going in to the top box, bringing in food to the young bees. Place 1:1 syrup feeder through hive-top bucket and place pollen feed in hive. This ensures the bees feel like they are on a light flow and helps ensure the new queens are fed the best nutrition.
Step 4: Day 2- 5 day old queen Wait 4-24 hours. Allow your young bees to sort themselves out, you want the young nurse bees to be moving up to cover the young brood through the QX cloak board.
Step 5: Day 2- 5 day old queen Slide in your tin cloak board cover and wait for the bees to feel queenless- 4 hours.
Step 6: Day 2, 4 hours later- 5 day old queen Take out the frame to graft (see grafting).
Step 7: Day 2- 5 day old queen Place the grafting frame with grafted larva in the top super with pollen frames on both side and honey on either side.
Step 8: Day 2- 5 day old queen Remove the extra brood from the colony in to an incubating hive (Remember to mark the frames introduced in to the incubator colony). The incubator colony must be strong enough to effectively feed the new young larva. You remove the extra young brood frames to ensure that the queen cells are properly fed. Remember, nutrition is important for the development of a perfect queen.
Step 9: Day 5- 9 day old queen Wait 3 days after removing the extra brood to the incubator colony to reintroduce the brood to its parent colony. This is so that you are sure that the bees in the parent colony are healthy and growing as the young brood hatches. When you move the frames back in you want it to look like this left to right in an 8-9 frame Langstroth: 2xhoney- open brood- young larva – graft – pollen - open brood - honeyx2. At this time, you will also remove the tin cloaking piece so that the hives are feeling queen-right.
IMPORTANT-When you are moving the brood back, make sure that there aren’t any queen cells or the other queen on the frames that you are moving back, these queen cells may be older than the grafted bees and when they hatch can kill your grafted queens and ruin your efforts! Also, if you are on a honey-flow (webbing between queen cells) you can place an empty frame on one side of the grafting frame to encourage them to build the wax there.
Step 10- Day 8-9 Set up your mating nucs and allow the nucs to go queenless for 1-2 days before moving the prepared queen cells to be moved in to.
Step 11: Day 10- 14 day old queen You pull the cells out and place them in your mating nucs: 1 cell per nuc.
IMPORTANT Do not pull the queen on day 8, this is the day that the queen is the most sensitive to movement and can be harmed though the vibrations.
Step 12: Day 10- 27 Day - The queen should mate within 17 days assuming that the weather is good, you should expect to pull a mated queen. The schematic runs on a 17 day cycle, but you can run on up to a 14 day cycle. If you get an 80% return on your mated queens from your % of viable cells, then you are doing really well. Birds, drift, and failure to hatch can happen in your mating nucs, so inspect the mating nucs 7 days after placing the ripe cells. It is good practice to let the queens lay for up to 2 days before pulling them for retail.
If you are going to produce a commercial operation, the rhythm of your system should go as follows on a 17 day cycle:
Graft QCells Ripened 2nd Graft Pull Mated Queens/Insert 2nd Graft
May 1 May 11th May 18th May 28
ß10days_________________________________
ß 17days_____________________________________________________
ß27 days__________________________________________________________________
*May 1- Graft- May 11- ripe cells to mating nucs- May 18 graft for 2nd round- May 28- Pull mated queens and let be queenless for minimum 4 hours- May 28th Place 2nd round of ripened cells in mating nucs on.
A: The youngest brood is best to graft from, but not eggs. Grafting from eggs is dangerous in the fact that you can destroy and or injure the egg more easily since the egg is attached to the cell bottom. When observing the brood to graft from, seek out the youngest brood, meaning that you will be looking for the following:
- A tiny, small amount of royal jelly in the bottom of the cell, but not enough to cover the bottom of the cell floor. Really, as small as you can see and the smallest that you can successfully transfer. You are always going for the smallest amount you can skillfully transfer, but practice makes perfect, so be sure to give it a go, make notes, and observe.
- The larva can be so small that you are unable to see it in the royal jelly until you pull it out with the Chinese grafting tool.
The key is, you don’t want to graft from larva that are older than 3 days old. This is because the larva of worker bees are fed a less quality and quantity of feed that the larva receives as a queen. So, if you graft from an older larva, the quality of queen is likely to be less because her queen developmental nutrition is less.
Q: How do you start your season?
A: Start the season by pinching the queen and add a new queen cell and allow the hive to break the brood cycle so that you can decrease the tracheal mite and weaken the varroa cycle.
A: Dont feed your bees in the springtime pollen patties to build up your bees if your goals with your bees is just for honey production. Your bees will build up faster, and if you don’t split them in to nucs, they will swarm on you earlier in the season. When they swarm they will have problems on your hands because you will have to requeen to ensure your bees are strong for the summer flow.
Q: What is the allowable mite load/mite wash to be able to sell the bees inter-provincially?
A: You need to have 1% or less meaning if you are doing a 80mL mite wash (300 bees) you shouldn’t find more than 3 mites. You must have your bees inspected to sell and the quantity of colonies will define the % of your colonies inspected by the regional inspector. You cannot sell nucs without the proper paperwork from the Province for inspection.
Q: What is the average price for a nuc sold out of BC today? Average price per queen?
A: Nucs are sold from $135-150/ nuc and a colony should be able to produce 2 nucs offering about $300 profit from each colony before honey and pollen sales. The average proven queen price is sold from $15-25/queen.
Q: How do you make candy for the queen cages?
A: You will need
- Disease free honey (warm)
- Icing sugar
To do: Add a little bit of warm honey to a bowl of icing sugar. Mix until it starts to clump and mix. Put the icing sugar and honey in to the oven at 170 degrees F for 20 minutes. Mix again until in a firm ball. Work it, put it in the oven again, then roll it again. You do this to a point where it won’t accept any more honey to it. You want something got when it is cold, it is rock hard. It takes a surprising amount of icing sugar to a little bit of honey. Once you get the candy in its ball, warm it up in the oven. Press it out on a plate at a thickness the tube in the cage. Cookie cut it in to the cage like a cookie-cutter.
Q: How do you feel about drone comb?
A: Drones are essential to the development of the species. They offer half of the genetic material and are offer the depth of diversity in breeding yards and mating yards. These drones offer the best mating material in to the development of the stock. As a colony develops over summers, the colony will develop more and more drone comb, so after some time, it can be essential to cut out the drone comb to ensure that you don’t have the resources of the colony going to drones. Drones do not gather nectar or pollen, so if you have too many drones, you won’t have the potential honey surplus that you could have. Having 10% of your bee population in drones during the summer is a comfortable population of drones.
Transporting queen cells
Q: What do you transport your queen cells in?
A: Upholsterers foam, with holes in it, allow for you to be able to set the cells in to the foam standing straight up and down, but you can lay them on their sides. You want to make sure that the box that you keep them in keeps them from water, wind, and heat. Heat can affect the queens worse than cooling. Keeping the queens in a small insulated container. Warm up a heating pad (to a warm condition, brood nest temperature of 33 degrees Celsius, not hot) place the foam in, set the cells in the foam, then place a tea towel over the cells so they don’t cool down. Try not to have your cells colder than 25 degrees Celsius. Do not let the cells go higher than 36 degrees Celsius. Cool temperatures can delay development, but tend not to kill unless the cells are cold for a very long time. If your cells become too warm, their colour will darken, so consider that before transportation.
Q: How long can you transport cells for?
A: You are on a time limit with cells based on when they were pulled from the hive, you don’t want them to hatch out while in transport. If you can keep them within the grounds of temperature as mentioned above, you can keep them for as long as they are capped and incubating.
Q: How do you select queens to overwinter your colonies in your mating nuc equipment?
A: Although the queens tend to be close in behaviour, design, and health, it is important to look at the queens size and the maximum number of bees with that queen. Judge a queens size not by the length of the abdomen, but by the width of the thorax. The greatest number of bees will allow for her to be protected with consolidating the bees so that the foreign bees aren’t balling up and killing your queen.
Mating Nucs
Q: What do you use for your mating nucs?
A: Gates uses Dadant extracting frames (shallow boxes) for his mating nucs. To start, you will use new frames and foundation (cut the foundation on a table saw to fit the foundation in the smaller). Then you can place the boxes on your standard beehives to pull the wax. He likes to use the small hives because they are light, compact, and easy to carry around. He also thinks that the smaller they are, the easier it is to observe the queen, and keep smaller. But, the smaller the equipment can cool and heat quickly. He recommends that you use what you have until you decide what works best for you, then build/make what you want.
A: Jamming your colony with honey from choosing not to harvest enough honey, or by over-feeding, what can happen is that your queen doesn’t have enough room to lay winter bees and build up the colony for winter, and or not have enough room to expand and lay in the spring. The risk in this is that you can have a viable queen in the spring with a dwindling colony, at which you will have to baby the colony until it reaches a balancing capacity so that the colony can feed the growing brood nest and forage for surplus.
A: One frame of bees and brood against the divider, 1 frame of honey and bees, and the divider. You can place another 4th frame in the 4 frame mating nuc later as the bees grow, and even pull out the feeder frame. It is key to have your mating yard somewhere hot and dry, so that you can keep the colony from stuffing the 4 frame mating nuc with honey. You want the bees to use the frames for brood production.
Q: How do you make sure that your brood is balanced in your mating nucs?
A: You need to remember, take notes, and or mark the nuc, on which colonies have extra brood and which ones don’t have enough. This is when you mix and match the brood in the nucs to make sure that they are all balanced out, ensuring that there is a healthy population of nurse bees but not too much nurse bees that your populations out grow your 4 frame box. If when you place the ripe queen cells in to the mating nuc, and she is lost (doesn’t hatch, killed in her mating flight etc), the colony will be in need of a brood frame to keep the colonies population consistent (that colony missed a brood cycle because there wasn’t a queen there to lay). You can balance the colonies honey frames too the same way, but be sure that there isn’t more honey frames then room for the newly mated queens to lay.
Nuc Yards and Big Colonies
Q: What should we consider for orientation cues for my bees to come back to their hives?
A: Colour of the hives, distinct environmental/geological features. You can also set up artificial features like brush piles and or plantings.
Q: What should I consider for my bee yards for mating nuc development?
A: Consider the microclimate and the wind. It is very important for the bees to be out of the wind so that they can fly more often and have successful mating flights. As well, you want the microclimate to be warmest in the spring so that the queens are flying earlier in the year so that development is quick of your stock has a longer season. You want your location to be dry as well, so that you have a smaller nectar flow to overflow your mating nuc frames with honey. Also, you also want to consider how close another beekeepers’ yard is. You want to try to be able to control the mating with your own drones. This means that if there is a lot of other bees in your area, try to keep your colonies with the selected stock (drones) nearer to your virgins to ensure your drones are in greater saturation of the mating. Remember, if you are raising queens you must be raising drones.
Q: How do you raise drones? Why is it important?
A: You situate your colonies in a way that the colonies that are doing really well, share the characteristics that you like to share with your quality queen production, are selected and moved in to an area that is closely accessible to your mating yards. Drones carry the important set of chromosomes for worker/queen bee production, the other half of the bees chromosomes necessary for the fertilization (workers/queens have 32 chromosomes, drones only 16). Drones take 24 days to develop from egg to mature bee, but drones can take up to 14 days to mature enough to become capable to properly mate with a virgin, so raising drones from your successful colonies must be in full swing before you consider viable mating within your queen rearing schedule (14-17 day schedule). Gates selects the best colonies and the second best colonies from each of his apiaries and brings them to his queen rearing yard, which can be your main mating yard, and have those colonies be your drone producers.
Making Nucs for Sale
Q: What is your spring management practice?
A: You want to make sure that the equipment that you are going to nuc form is full, and not too full that they are going to swarm or do swarm. Gates will go out to all of his hives and even them out by the middle of April to ensure that they are all evened out. That means that there are 3 frames of brood and a 1 frame of honey all covered with bees (this is the pollination standard for the Okanagan). This means that you will take brood from your colonies that are doing really well and help out the colonies that are a little weak from the winter. By balancing your colonies out, you are standardizing your colonies so that your growth within the colonies is consistent and manageable.
Q: What do you do to make nucs from your colonies?
A: Find your queen before you do your splitting in to nucs. This is important because you want to make sure that you place queen cells in to the nucs that need queens, and are not requeening colonies that already have queens. This is only if you are not wanting to requeen your year old queens.
TOPS (NZ easy re-queening strategy): Nucs on top of a 2 box hive. This offers an average 80% re-queening success. You can also use this set up to create nucs without finding the queen.
Q: How do you re-queen colonies in the spring with the TOPS method?
A: You start with a standard colony in 2 lang boxes stacked (parent colony), box of comb (no bees) with a ¾” hole bored in to the box on each side of the box so that you can turn this box in to a 2 nuc colony.
Step 1: Shake the bees off of 3-4 combs of brood of all ages out of the parent colony and place the brood in the empty box
Step 2: Put the empty frames of comb in the centre of the brood nest in the parent colony. This gives the parent colony room to develop and the queen room to lay, delaying swarming.
Step 3: You place a QX on the top of the parent colony, then place the box of comb now with the brood in it on top of the parent colony. Add the divider between the top box so that the top box is now 2 nucs. Make sure that there is an entrance in the box on both sides.
Step 4: The brood will become covered with nurse bees that will come up through the excluder and cover the brood.
Step 5: Add in a divider so that your bees become queenless (no queen pheromone from the bottom box comes through).
You now have 2 queenless colonies on top of the colony to raise natural queen cells. You raise these queens and have them mate.
Step 6: After the queens are mated, pull out the divider and the queen excluder, and have the queens fight it out. You now have 3 brood boxes and no queenless cycle or decrease in production, as well as a strong, healthy queen.
Step 7: Watch as the bees push the queen down in the box and start to fill the top boxes with honey.
Q: How do you make nucs in the spring with the TOPS method?
A: You start with a standard colony in 2 lang boxes stacked (parent colony), box of comb (no bees) with a ¾” hole bored in to the box on each side of the box so that you can turn this box in to a 2 nuc colony.
Step 1: Shake the bees off of 3-4 combs of brood of all ages out of the parent colony and place the brood in the empty box.
Step 2: Put the empty frames of comb in the centre of the brood nest in the parent colony. This gives the parent colony room to develop and the queen room to lay, delaying swarming.
Step 3: You place a QX on the top of the parent colony, then place the box of comb now with the brood in it on top of the parent colony. Add the divider between the top box so that the top box is now 2 nucs. Make sure that there is an entrance in the box on both sides.
Step 4: The brood will become covered with nurse bees that will come up through the excluder and cover the brood.
Step 5: Add in a divider so that your bees become queenless (no queen pheromone from the bottom box comes through).
Step 6: You now have 2 queenless colonies that will start to develop natural queen cells.
Step 7: Wait 14-17 days until the queens are mated.
You now have 2 queen-right colonies on top of the parent colony to raise natural queen cells. You raise these queens, have them mate, and you can now remove these nucs for sale or development.
Q: What is a best colony, according to John Gates, to breed from?
A: Wintering= Populations and Honey consumption.
Populations: Imported queens from Hawaii and NZ can have a hard time overwintering because the queens lie in too late and prepare for the coming winter months and or don’t build up a large enough spring build up because the winter bee population was low in the fall. So, how do you know that your bees have wintered? You have a healthy and strong colony in the spring (March 15th when the pollen patties go in) and he looks to see which ones are strong and makes a note of it. When he comes out for the evening out process of the colonies in min-April, which colony/queens wintered well.
Honey Consumption: You want to make sure that the bees in the colony and enough honey to balance that development. You can often find +bees/-honey, or –bees/+honey. You want to breed from bees that have +bees/+honey in the hive. That is a sure sign of that the bees are developing in the spring and fall well.
Disease resistance: Gates does not breed from bees that show signs of ANY disease, even if all of the other breeding characteristics are intact, he will not breed from them.
Gentleness: It is more fun to work with bees that are nice and enjoyable to work with. The more aggressive the bees, the longer to it takes to manage your bees, and time is money. Gates will not select ornery colonies.
Quietness of Comb: It is great so that you can inspect and find the queen. When the bees are running all over the place, it is hard and time consuming to find her.
Honey Production: It is a difficult one to gauge with the colony because of a few things: Drift throughout the summer can cause bees with full bellies of nectar can go in to the closest colony and that colony can be heavier with honey. Also, longevity, some bees live longer than others, and you can breed for this as well, but it is incredibly hard to measure. Gates has seen 2 queen colonies in 2-5% of his colonies, meaning that the greater work force can draw more honey. Tibore Szabo, Beaverlodge AB, started the 24 hour weight gain test. You test during the honey flow and weigh in exactly 24 hours and check within your apiary. This allows for you to have a better understanding of honey weight gain in a colony.
Solid Brood Pattern: If the bees have been inbred, the queen will not have a good brood pattern. You identify this by the capped brood pattern. Misses are what caused by bees eating out the eggs of the brood pattern because she is laying a drone egg in a worker cell (this tends to be a diandromorph drone a drone with 32 chromosomes). You can also have a disease problems too, and these spots can be created by the removal of diseased larva. You want to assess the brood pattern in to late spring because spring patterns can be a bit more spotty then the summer months.
- You have a strong colony that you want to split. You want to put on a box on with multiple entrances facing all 4 directions.
- Split that hive up to 6 nucs and face the nuc entrances toward the location where the hive was in a circle. This allows the foraging bees to enter the new nuc boxes so your foragers are confined with going to only one nuc box, and it spreads their populations around.
- You can paint the boxes, symbols, or something to define the difference between their home boxes to decrease the amount of drift.
