# EZI-QUEEN REARING KIT



## crownhoney (Oct 26, 2002)

Hey I'm about to use my EZI queen rearing kit for the first time and was wondering if anybody had any experience, tips, ideas before I got started.


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## wfarler (Jul 9, 2003)

Google Dave Cushman's site on beekeeping. Under queen rearing he has a lot of good material. There are some very interesting graphs of drone populations based on date. While the data is from England I think you can easily compare to your weather and day length conditions. I cannot speak from experience on this but the data would suggest it might be a bit early for the queen grafting in Missouri. However, I will defer to someone with more experience.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>Hey I'm about to use my EZI queen rearing kit for the first time and was wondering if anybody had any experience, tips, ideas before I got 
I think it's basically a Jenter system isn't it? Search for Jenter on this forum and you'll find a lot of discussions on it. My biggest problem has been getting the cell builders to build a decent amount of cells. I think the main secret is overcrowding of nurse bees in the cell builder. I have an outline of what I did that worked best for me. Again, you should find that if you read the discussions on Jenter. If you don't find them, I'll look it up and post it again.

>I cannot speak from experience on this but the data would suggest it might be a bit early for the queen grafting in Missouri. However, I will defer to someone with more experience.

We American's can never keep state abreviations straight.







MS is Mississippi. MO is Missori. MT is Montana. MN is Minnesota. MI is Michigan. ME is Maine. (and I probably messed one of them up) 

I don't know when there are drones in Mississippi.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

EZI is Dadant's version. I looked that up. Here's what I did the last time that worked the best for me:


Queen rearing plan:

Make sure you have a minimum four medium box strong colony or equivalent.
Make sure you have chosen a queen mother.
Make sure you have cell bars set up with cups etc.
Make sure you have a cell cup system of some kind. (Jenter, grafting, etc)
Make sure you have a "Floor without floor" box. Make one with a 3/4" by 3/4" piece of wood with a 3/8" x 3/8" groove in it. Hang it out 3/4" in front and put a piece across the front under the sides to make a landing board. Cut a piece of 3/16" laun to slide in for a removable bottom. Coat edges with Vaseline to keep from connecting. Maybe make it with the landing board on both ends and make a 3/4 x 3/8 (7/156?) x 15 ½ entrance block for one end. That way you can make it open either directions by just moving the entrance block.
Make sure you have mating nucs. (two frame nucs with a top jar feeder and adequate ventilation to close them off would be nice) unless you want to introduce the queens to the hives as virgins.
Another setup is to make a three box wide bottom board facing normal direction (the entrance is perpendicular to the frames) so that you have three medium boxes side by side with all the entrances for those facing the same direction. Have entrance blocks/reducers for the boxes. Put excluders/includers on the bottom of outside boxes. Arrange cell starter in middle and put two queenright colonies on the sides. Block entrances on sides to force bees into the middle box.. Or build a single three box wide box with queen excluder and solid dividers. This you can manipulate similarly to the FWOF by opening and closing entrances and adding a ¾ x ¾ block under the sides of the boxes to separate them when you need to.

Days are counted from the day the egg is layed.

This is all done in one strong hive that already has the breeder queen.

Day	Action
-1	Set up top box with: Nectar- Brood- Brood- Pollen- Eggs- Cell Bar- Eggs- Pollen- Brood- Nectar. Put breeder queen in top box with Jenter box and cell cups brood, division board feeder, pollen and honey, over an excluder. Put all remaining brood and pollen in the bottom box. Put everything else in the middle. CONCEPT: This is so that we have some open brood and lots of food for the cell raisers in the top box. Also the cell cups and the Jenter box will get the smell of the hive and be polished by the bees.

0	Close breeder queen in Jenter box. Feed. CONCEPT: This is so that the queen will lay in the cell cups and we will know the age of the eggs/larvae.

1	Release queen from Jenter box. Feed CONCEPT: We are done with the queen laying and she is not excluded from the cell plugs in the box so that we know the age.

2 Set up Cell Starter/Cell Builder: Take the queen out of the top box and cage her. Put the top box on top of the inner cover (with a screen over the hole). Shake all bees from all the other boxes into the top box. If you dont think they will all fit, start with the brood frames and then add the rest until you cant get the lid on for all the bees piled up on the box. Put bottom box (as set up above) on the bottom board and release the queen there. Add an excluder on top of this and the middle boxes on top of that. Add Floor Without Floor. Put top box (with all shaken bees) on top of the FWOF with the floor in and the inner cover on top of that. Feed. You could turn the Jenter box sideways so the cells face down so that the bees will start some queen cells here, although we are going to transfer them anyway. The field bees will fly out and return to the bottom part of the hive. The nurse bees will remain in the top, cell building box. CONCEPT: The object here is to make the top box into a queenless cell builder. Since they are queenless they will want to build queen cells. The bees are shaken into it to make both an overcrowded condition, which is a stimulus to swarm, and so that there will be an excess of nurse bees that can feed the queens. The FWOF and the excluder keeping the queen in the bottom box, is what is making this part queenless and we will be able to remove it without disturbing the bees much. This is the step that has failed most often for me. It is REALLY critical that the cell builder box be queenless AND overcrowded with nurse bees.

4	Transfer larvae from Jenter to cell cups with preference to those that are already started as queen cells and replace in Cell starter. Feed nuc and cell starter. CONCEPT: The larvae are now the right age to transfer and the bees are now queenless enough to raise queens. We put them in the cups to convert them to queen cells. We feed so that the queens will be fed well.

6	See if queen cups are started. Remove Floor from FWOF to establish queen right cell finisher. Feed. CONCEPT: By now the bees should have started all of the cells they intend to. We remove the FWOF to make the hive queenright again. The theory is that a queenright colony does a better job raising queens than when they are raising emergency queens.

7-8	Feed

8	Cells capped

9	Start another batch of queen cells in this box if you want.

12	Make a shaken swarm box from other hives from brood comb (nurse bees) and divvy out bees to mating nucs and close up in the shade for the night. (Maybe use some QMP to hold them). Feed mating nucs. Start with a frame of pollen and honey and an empty frame. Fill a frame of PermaComb for each. Pollen on one side, honey on the other. CONCEPT: We need some queenless bees to accept the queen cells, and care for the virgin queen while she mates and starts to lay. We want to mix up a lot of bees and then redivide them to make them more accepting of each other and of he queen. We have pollen and honey so they can feed the queen and any brood she lays.

13	Transfer the queen cells to the mating nucs. Open up the entrances for the nucs. CONCEPT: The bees in the nucs have had time to organize and hopefully they wont all drift back to their old hive. But they need to fly and the queen needs to be able to mate, so we open up the nucs.

15-16	Queens emerge. Note: small cell queens may emerge earlier or not. Enlarged queens may be on time or a day or two late.

22	First possible day to fly

25	First possible day to mate

27	Still mating

28	First day we may find eggs. Look for eggs. Dont panic if there arent any. Weather can set things back. Check again every couple of days.


Here are some links to info on queen rearing in general. The only thing that's different is the grafting parts:

http://www.ohioqueenbreeders.com/queen_rearing.htm 
http://www.apis.demon.co.uk/beekeeping/newsletters/Spring-1998.html#Queen-rearing 
http://outdoorplace.org/beekeeping/queens.htm 
http://www.beesource.com/pov/hayes/abjmay91.htm 
http://queencalendar.markfarm.com/Default.aspx 
http://www.gobeekeeping.com/Appliedqueenrearing.htm 


[This message has been edited by Michael Bush (edited September 05, 2004).]


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## Curry (Sep 22, 2003)

I use the ohioqueenbreeders method with my queen kit. One mistake was not putting a tight lid on the production box (wasn't warm enough or too light inside). Also, I would attach the cell grid to a frame and let the bees build wax all around it and covering the frame. I remove the queen just as soon as she lays eggs in the grid, and then let her lay eggs in the comb around the grid. This way the workers will attend to the eggs in the grid once they become larva, otherwise, if there are not other eggs/larva nearby, they will just let the larva die that's in the grid. I use two or three other hives to build the queens, around 20 (30 max) queens per hive. Using the queenright method (ohioqueenbreeders.com) you can use as many hives as you want to build- just use real strong ones (you want lots of nurse bees). Good luck and have fun.


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## ikeepbees (Mar 8, 2003)

"I don't know when there are drones in Mississippi."

I'm in Mobile, AL (Gulf coast) and here we usually have plenty of adult drones by the last week in February or first week in March.

------------------
Rob Koss

[This message has been edited by ikeepbees (edited February 10, 2004).]


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## Jorge (Sep 24, 2002)

Not having done this ever... for small scale replacement old ones, would it make any sense to make a small split or several, place them in nucs, wait until the queen cells have been made and then simply move back the frame with the q-cells into the hive to be requeened before the new queens hatch? How common is it for bees to simultaneously make q-cells on more than one frame in the same hive?

Jorge


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>Not having done this ever... for small scale replacement old ones, would it make any sense to make a small split or several, place them in nucs, wait until the queen cells have been made and then simply move back the frame with the q-cells into the hive to be requeened before the new queens hatch? How common is it for bees to simultaneously make q-cells on more than one frame in the same hive?

Odds are they will build several cells on several frames. How many is partly driven by how many nurse bees are available and how much pollen and honey is available to feed them. If you use new wax and no wires for the frames to put in the nucs for the queenrearing they will be easy to cut out of the frame and then you can put just one cell in each hive. If you turn the same frame horizontally you'll get far more but there will be too much connecting them all together. Destroy every other row in all directions and they will be far enough apart to separate more easily.http://www.beesource.com/pov/hayes/abjmay91.htm

But just doing a split and then divying out the queen cells, as you described, works ok too.


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