# Should I make queen cages?



## kramerbryan (Oct 30, 2013)

If you need up to 2,000 why not just buy them?


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## beeware10 (Jul 25, 2010)

cheaper just to buy them.


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## SeaCucumber (Jun 5, 2014)

beeware10 said:


> cheaper just to buy them.


Where should I buy them? Should they be plastic or wood? Should they have 1 entrance or 2? Do they come with entrance plugs? The cost of making 1,000 out of plain wood is around $40 in materials. The time would be between 20 min. and 2 h.


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## rookie2531 (Jul 28, 2014)

If you can make 1k of them in 2 hours. Then make them. I made ten this spring and it probably took that long.


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## clyderoad (Jun 10, 2012)

SeaCucumber said:


> Where should I buy them? Should they be plastic or wood? Should they have 1 entrance or 2? Do they come with entrance plugs? The cost of making 1,000 out of plain wood is around $40 in materials. The time would be between 20 min. and 2 h.


yeah right.

what gives, you would like 30 to 2000? and don't know which cage you should make/use/buy? and only 1 best design?
something is not right.
Ace has met his match!


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## Sunday Farmer (Nov 13, 2013)

SeaCucumber said:


> Where should I buy them? Should they be plastic or wood? Should they have 1 entrance or 2? Do they come with entrance plugs? The cost of making 1,000 out of plain wood is around $40 in materials. The time would be between 20 min. and 2 h.


I pickup extra work as a carpenter for cash. Your estimate is the very reason I work hourly as a carpenter and not as a general contractor. 
If you need 2000 queen cages, and I am saying this based upon my little business, then you have so much more/other important work that the 50 cents for a cage can't matter. I like to she money, but things like this I think cost me money if I do them. 
To answer your question- IMO, the wood cages....any of them, are better than the plastic. I use the plastic since I have a bag of 100 under my truck seat as a just in case. But I can't wait for them to be gone.


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## HarryVanderpool (Apr 11, 2005)

Well here is a personal preference which amounts to nothing more than an opinion, so take it for what it's worth:
The only cage we use is the California mini cage.
They are very small and fit between frames with minimal comb disruption.
You can fit a WHOLE BUNCH more in a queen bank than 3 hole cages.
We will not purchase queens in 3 hole cages, period.
We raise some of our queens and have certain queen producers we regularly buy from that all use the mini cage. 
We save many of the mini cages that we use for re-use.
And if, IF I were to decide to produce my own queen cages, (I have used cages coming out of my ears), I would make minis because they are so simple.

I don't know if any of that is of any value, but good luck!









Photo credit: Marie Bowers


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## Kamon A. Reynolds (Apr 15, 2012)

SO cheap, buy them! I think it would be better to spend that time building boxes or lids. 

Some of my customers want wooden cages. Many of the bigger beekeepers ask for their queens in plastic ones. Personal preference!


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## SeaCucumber (Jun 5, 2014)

Thanks for the pic. Harry. If I had to replicate that, I would use a CNC router. I'm not going to make them immediately, so I should have time to find cheap/free wood. Hopefully, I could rout in an area of 4'X8'. 
I would rout the main cavity to be 3/4", and then rout the holes with a smaller bit. There would be one channel going all the way through (like in this pic:






), except it would get narrow, and shallow near the ends. In order to make them as narrow as possible, I would rip the strips (hopefully 4' long) on a table saw, attach screens, and then use a cross cut sled.


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## SeaCucumber (Jun 5, 2014)

I'll buy them if I must, but I don't make $300/h right now. I can't afford to sell queens for $30 if I have to spend $0.5 on a cage.


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## biggraham610 (Jun 26, 2013)

You cant afford to sell queens for $30 if you have to spend $0.50 on a cage? Are you serious? I believe Clyde is right. If your profit margin will be overly affected by a 50 cent investment, you may want to look into more profitable venture. Wow. G


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## JWChesnut (Jul 31, 2013)

SeaCucumber said:


> I can't afford to sell queens for $30 if I have to spend $0.5 on a cage.


Are we being trolled? You started your "first real year" of beekeeping this summer. This is a counting chickens before they hatch situation. 
You are going into winter with 3 or 5 hives (the situation isn't clear, and you posted about killing a queen that wasn't stopping mites). You are managing mites by dusting one hive with sugar, despite your mentor losing all his bees to mites.

You realize that a queen raising operation needs a whole lot more than 3 uncertainly overwintered hives. Read up on starter-finishers and mating nucs. Simply drawing the frames on mini-mating nucs (which you must have before you have any need for queen cages) is a multiyear process for a small operation. 

And $30 ? Some of the most charismatic names in North East beekeeping sold queens on this forum, and they weren't asking $30. What makes you think a newbee with an imperfect understanding of the trade can flog his queens for top dollar. 

Yeah, I know that you could capture a swarm and kill the swarm queen and use a mess of bees for a starter. I know an artfully used Cloake board could start some cells in a divided hive. I know Lauri pulled large mini-frames off a specially perpendicularly divided super. But really what gives here, pipe dreams?

===
My Post is likely a little harsh. 
1. Build to a standard long dimension -- queens will be banked, and queen bank designs assume a top to bottom standard, and a standard depth.
2. A port hole with a 10 mm (7/16") bore is really practical. See the Dean Stiglitz reptile aquarium incubator.







3. The queen cups can double as a cork if you run out of corks. Running the queen (and attendants) into the cage is easier with a porthole.
4. What is the market? Three hole design (called Benson?) ships better - the attendants don't crush the queen. The candy plug can be hand filled with a spatula. The California mini-cage works better with a no attendants, immediate introduction -- especially in the tight fit of 4 frame nucs. The plastic pilot in the mini-cage is another fabrication step, and an expense and control issue if you go with prefilled candy.

The oversize of the 3 hole design works better with newbees. It doesn't make sense to me, but this summer I had three newbees leave their queen cages out of the nucs for days (until queen death) - in analysis paralysis -- unable to begin the introduction process. Many cages get inserted wrong with the screen against wax, and the queen starves. The industrial design with a coved recess for the screen gives a tunnel for nurse bees to find the queen.

5. Cages should have an arrow (This end up!) -- as many are inserted upside down and dead attendants clog the candy. A thumbtack and a fabric ribbon are a nice touch.

6. The 3 hole design lends itself to old-school fabrication with a drill press and a saw. Mortising bit in drill press with a hard stop is all that is needed -- and a mortising bit can be kludged from cutting the pilot off a Forstner bore. No CNC required.








You do require a flowchart and calendar for the queen rearing operation. A queenless cell builder is a major commitment of resources. A cellbuilder need an external reserve to rebuild the population as each cohort matures. Queens cycle on a 10-11 day calendar, and resources must be ready for every step. A graftable frame from a breeder laying a energetic pattern, 2 lbs of bees to fill 20 mating nucs, a full cohort of new nurse bees to crowd into the cell builder. A fresh set of mating boxes, as "last weeks" cohort is still getting underway. Drone rich hives with different lineage from the breeder queen.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

When you have the time this winter them make them.
We do not judge others because we don't know what their plan is
on beekeeping. Maybe he has acquired a big bee yard. And some super
vsh or hygienic queens. Or find a partner
that enable him to expand to use that many queen cages. Maybe he just wanted
to build them one time through and not has to deal with them anymore. Who know? Bottom line is
we don't really know what others are doing with their bee operation.
So if he want to build them then freely to do so. 
Check out amazon, ebay and alibaba, etc. to see if you can buy them cheaper than you can make them.
Be sure to factor in the time and total cost of everything too.


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## kramerbryan (Oct 30, 2013)

Do you already have a CNC router? Maybe you should buy some different cages and see which one you like? It's not like you are going to have 1000 queens overnight to sell. Have you even produced one queen? I think you are getting way ahead of yourself. Why is your margin so small that .50 will be too much? When you give up on beekeeping and have 999 cages left over see if you can get .50 a piece for them and recoup some money.


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## SeaCucumber (Jun 5, 2014)

JW has some useful info. Thanks.

Personal info for JW:

Thanks for the info. I shouldn't have a problem with mites. I have 2 hives stacked next to eachother. They both have 4 mediums with comb, and 1 empty medium with frames at the bottom. Each comb medium is more than 3/4 drawn, and the most drawn frames are towards the center. They have far more stores than my colony that died last year. Last year I only had 1 swarm that didn't quite fill a medium. I fed it heavily. It almost got to spring, and then starved. The mites/bees ratios for the hives this year are better/equal to the hive last year. My colony with a new black queen never has many mites. My swarm colony with a brown queen has average mites normally, but I dusted it a few times before combining it with a low mite queenless colony. My swarm colony's queen was the most prolific layer of all colonies a few months ago. Next year, I'm going to buy early packages, start them off with some drawn frames, and raise queens from my best survivors (of my 2 wintered hives). There are also some club people who I might want to graft from. One bought 2 nucs from vtbees.com (a 9 hour drive). My mentor who lost all his bees to mites is a bit old. He used solid bottom boards, and all new Georgia packages, and didn't treat. When I get useful info from him, I check multiple sources to verify it (as with all info.).


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## SeaCucumber (Jun 5, 2014)

JWChesnut said:


> drill press and a saw No CNC required


I would never do that. That's for someone with infinite time. I could use the CNC learning. My makerspace is inexpensive, and the CNC router experience is nice for a resume and other projects.
I haven't used much CNC. I used a dado blade, table saw, and chop saw for my boxes. I made 23, so it was too few for CNC.


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## SeaCucumber (Jun 5, 2014)

Where I live, getting a decent nuc is a pain, and requires a long drive. I want to raise local, northern, treatment free, foundationless nucs and queens. I guess I treat a bit with some hives, but the goal is to select for bees that don't need treatment. For mating yards, I'll do my best to find areas where there's a higher probability of colonies being mostly hygienic northern survivors.

The most important questions to answer are: which cage design to make (or buy)? Should it have 2 entrance holes? Can I plug the hole with a leaf or putty instead of a cork? If I make 1k, I could choose a faster production method that's suitable for the quantity, and not have to think about resupplying for a long time. If I make 30, I still have to be efficient. I'm choosing a design early because wood hoarding takes time.


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## rookie2531 (Jul 28, 2014)

I feel if you have a few hives and no local supply and want to start breeding program for treatment free, cages will most likely be lower on your list of bulk supply. Try getting some vsh queens from Mike Palmer. I know he and Dan o'hanlens crew, has been working on the mite biters. I think it's Purdue and west Virginia queen breeders, or something like that. I would start with some of those queens to help get your drones genetics. Jmo, good luck.


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## JWChesnut (Jul 31, 2013)

SeaCucumber said:


> Next year, I'm going to buy early packages, start them off with some drawn frames, and raise queens from my best survivors (of my 2 wintered hives).


Queenless packages as cell starters? Pricey for the service.

Going into the 1000 queen rearing biz on two wintered hives. Have moic'y, have I entered the twilight zone.

There are some great posts on this board, and good books that will walk you through the queen rearing process.
Not to recapitulate their instructions, but you need multiple resource streams to raise queens in sufficient quantity to justify the sacrifice of productivity and time.
Cells are started in a highly unstable queenless, but crowded condition to push cell building. == 4 or 5 lbs of queenless workers, renewed each cell cycle.
Multiple resources to build mating nucs -- you have a very narrow time window to fill the mating nucs == 1-2 lbs of queenless workers.
Multiple special purpose nucs to hold the cells. Then 11 days later you must repeat the process.

I'm all in favor of unfettered enthusiasm, but this is hallucinatory.

David LaFerney has a great post on grafting, and he said, bluntly, "The first time you graft you are going to suck at doing it". This doesn't matter so much if you have a yard full of bees to fall back on. However, if you are buying packages, just to get workers to draw cells, its will be a costly learning curve.

Say you use a package for the cell builders, and your yield is 15 queen cells. You'll need another package for the mating boxes. Your mated return to the boxes might be 80%. Your cost (just in bees) is $200/12 or $16 queen. You can amortize the hardware, the feed is inconsequential, but you are near market value for queens just in sunk costs.

You have expanded your dream to include nucs, and foundationless frames. Nucs require more resources than queens -- 5 frames and at least 2 pounds of bees out the door everytime a deep nuc is sold. Drawing foundationless requires a massive commitment of dedicated "wax" bees. My nucs have a 15 month timeline -- I cannot create more than I have the comb to support -- so I must be building comb months before a queen is ever hatched. The 2-3 pounds of bees that populate a healthy nuc are stripped from production colonies -- they must be grown and replaced.

I think anyone could have a nuc available by year four, but you will also still be in the doubling phase of your own apiary, and all those hard earned frames are lost when you sell them. An achievable sequence of internal growth is 0-2-8-16 -- and at that point you might have the resources and experiences to sell bees to the public and enough surplus to rear queens. If I understand your sequence it runs something like 1>0 + 5 > 2 > ???


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## JWChesnut (Jul 31, 2013)

SeaCucumber said:


> which cage design to make (or buy)? Should it have 2 entrance holes? Can I plug the hole with a leaf or putty instead of a cork? If I make 1k, I could choose a faster production method that's suitable for the quantity, and not have to think about resupplying for a long time. If I make 30, I still have to be efficient. I'm choosing a design early because wood hoarding takes time.


The wood mini-cage is suitable for self-introductions and multiple shipments (the attendants are loose in a caged shipping box -- like a queen bank -- and feed the queens from the outside.

If you are selling to hobbyists in 1 and 2's you need a cage that holds attendants inside. That is the 3 whole or one of the plastic cages. 

If you are selling to hobbyists you need a cork and candy hole. If you are doing your own introductions -- you do not need candy.

Sounds like you want to make gear -- and a homemade queen bank is works better with wood. (I suppose you could fabricate stands for the plastic cages).

Plugging a hole with a leaf sounds cute, but impractical. Bees tear into the cages, especially the aggressive monsters favored by the TF crowd. The leaf and putty wouldn't stand a chance, and the queen would be dragged out and dispatched.

I've notice the VSH queens I have (F1 from VP) have shredded wings and mostly lost paint-- an acquaintance speculated the VSH behavior has meant the workers have mauled the queen in their zeal to "hygiene" -- can you imagine their reaction to a leaf.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

I believe wood is easier on the bees because it is absorbent, plus they can grip it easier. It's warmer too. I have done experiments caging a bunch of (queenless) bees in both plastic and wood cages then leaving them to see how long they live. Every time I have done this the bee deaths start mounting in the plastic cages before the wood cages. Anyone could try this experiment.

However plastic is more convenient. For mailing queens I want the queen to have every possible advantage so they go in wood cages that I make myself. For my own requeening I tend to use plastic just for the convenience, as the queens are mostly introduced within 24 hours of caging.

Re the economics, factoring in labor it costs more to make wood cages but I think it's worth it.


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## SeaCucumber (Jun 5, 2014)

I guess if they're in high demand I should buy a 100 pack of California minis so I have the dimensions.

If I made California mini cages, they would be cut like this. I don't know the dimensions, but the idea is that they would likely have entrance holes adjacent to the screen. Otherwise, the entrance holes would be hard to make.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

If you do that you will have to put something such as greased paper between the candy and the wire to stop the hive bees eating the candy through the wire and causing premature release.

If you want to make wood ones here is a link to some commercial ones for sale, how about splash out $4.90 and buy 10 of them so you can get a close look and figure out how you can make something similar. 
http://www.mannlakeltd.com/beekeeping-supplies/product/HD-396.html

The end hole is not difficult. If you are making them in quantity you have a drill mounted horizontally over the right sized jig and push the cages into it, set up right thousands of end holes can be done in an hour.


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## biggraham610 (Jun 26, 2013)

Oldtimer said:


> If you want to make wood ones here is a link to some commercial ones for sale, how about splash out $4.90 and buy 10 of them so you can get a close look and figure out how you can make something similar.
> http://www.mannlakeltd.com/beekeeping-supplies/product/HD-396.html


Good Info Oldtimer, but boy oh boy, that $4.90s gonna cut way into that 1000 queen profit margin. What were you thinking?:no: ...... G


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## JWChesnut (Jul 31, 2013)

SeaCucumber said:


> I guess if they're in high demand I should buy a 100 pack of California minis so I have the dimensions.


Or just use Beesource and get verified plans.
http://www.beesource.com/forums/sho...lifornia-Mini-Queen-Cages&p=707146#post707146

-- however minicages are not for selling to hobbyists -- no attendants in the cages. These are designed for lots of 25-50.


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## jwcarlson (Feb 14, 2014)

CF Koehnen has them cheap, something like $250 for 1250 of them. That is several lifetime supplies for someone who thinks they are going to need 2000 queen cages with their two (possibly) overwintered colonies. Are these bees the ones inoculated with the crushed up bumblebee spray?

I'd post a link but Barry would just delete the post because we're not supposed to help each other find stuff...


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Good info JWC, and here's a link straight to their products, avoiding any less reputable chat sites LOL 

http://www.koehnen.com/#!products/ccib

For the OP, I think the 3 hole cage is the type of thing he needs, and they are simple to make with a drill press, I can remember as a young guy standing at a bench for days churning out these things.


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