# Produce queens from eggs, not larvae



## Norbee (May 8, 2016)

Does anyone have experience in producing queens from cells with eggs instead of larvae - Cutting out some comb instead of grafting? Is it more difficult to get the bees to take? Any special considerations for a cell builder (eg has to be queenless and broodless)?

I find it interesting since researchers have been able to find metabolic differences in larvae down to 12 hours old, depending on if they were started as queens or workers.


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## Eikel (Mar 12, 2014)

Never really tried but don't see why it wouldn't work (if they don't need protein and eat them).

Curious how/where the difference occurs in the first 12 hours since all young larvae receive RJ?


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## eltalia (Jun 12, 2017)

A well experienced apiarist - not a queen breeder - my first forays into cell grafting using the holepunch method was a disaster, 100% mortality.

There being more to it then meets the eye I then fail to comprehend why
a "backyarder" would bother beyond just curiousity. There exist specialist breeders, and the ability to raise emergency queens, so why spend what is a very small window in time (seasonly) pacing colonys through queen rearing per se in the backyard. It's not like Joe Hobbets Queens are going to revolutionise the industry wholesale, is it?

Bill


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## Eikel (Mar 12, 2014)

Cutting to the chase - because I can, enjoy working with the bees and trying different techniques. No plans to revolutionize the industry or cash in on the massive amount of money to be made. I import a couple of queens every year for genetics and hygienic traits, use these and existing hives for splits to allow the hobby to pay for itself.

Not trying to be confrontational or disrespectful but what was your motivation for starting and continuing to keep bees?


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## billabell (Apr 19, 2010)

Norbee said:


> Does anyone have experience in producing queens from cells with eggs instead of larvae - Cutting out some comb instead of grafting? Is it more difficult to get the bees to take? Any special considerations for a cell builder (eg has to be queenless and broodless)?
> 
> I find it interesting since researchers have been able to find metabolic differences in larvae down to 12 hours old, depending on if they were started as queens or workers.


I don't but the bees do. :lookout: Just kidding. 
Next spring I intend to try the Hopkins or Case Method 
of queen raising and combining it with the Cloake Board method for the cell builder. I am anxious to hear from Laurie who has a post going on introducing virgin queens on cells. She was going to do some around the first of September but I don't think she has posted the results yet. I'll get the thread and post it here in case you are interested.


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## eltalia (Jun 12, 2017)

"Not trying to be confrontational or disrespectful but what was your motivation for starting and continuing to keep bees ?"

Mine?
I was required to study entomology (sp?) as part of a tertiary graduate structure in agriculture. European honeybees fell into that work.
On farm, eventually, I came across a very very old german fellow who, close to departing this mortal coil, invited me into his apiary... the rest is 
now a 50yr+ history of ambition and angst.

Your turn...

Bill


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## Eikel (Mar 12, 2014)

Only wanted a couple of hives and a little honey now and then; read a bunch and set out to "bend them to my will. End of the season, they handed me my hat and asked me to come again next year. Decided I needed to learn more about their traits and tendencies; discovered some of the old masters, started trying their methods and new techniques. Of course you can't do that with just two hives, so 2 became 12 and 12 begot 20, etc, etc ...... as you said, the rest is a history. Still find the little beggars fascinating and challenging; ironically I still have no desire to be a honey peddler but resigned to it as part of the territory. 

Sorry to hijack your thread Norbee. Still don't see a problem using cell cut method with eggs but yes - queenless for 4 days so no viable eggs exist and tear down any queen cells. Also decide if you're going to use an open or closed cell builder. The risk for an open builder is a queen returning from a mating flight can decide the cell builder is a better deal than the nuc, it plays the devil with the queen cells. Interested in hearing how it works for you.


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## billabell (Apr 19, 2010)

This is the thread I mentioned. http://www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?339682-Introducing-cells-or-virgins


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## Norbee (May 8, 2016)

The RJ is not the same. The bees differentiate on RJ based on age of larva and caste of larva. That's why you can't use an old larva. The differentiation must happen very early. 

Brood pheromone from a larva increases the likelihood that bees will take on cell building. Still wondering if anyone has experience using eggs?

Why I would raise queens? Here they cost a bit more than 100 dollars, and I want to change queens every year and produce splits for sale. I can save a months pay from my day job by rearing some queens every year. Why wouldn't I? We only have carnica in my area, so admittedly it's easier than many places.


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## eltalia (Jun 12, 2017)

@Norbee
"Why I would raise queens? Here they cost a bit more than 100 dollars , and I want to change queens every year and produce splits for sale. I can save a months pay from my day job by rearing some queens every year. Why wouldn ' t I? We only have carnica in my area , so admittedly it's easier than many places ."

Fair enough... a different commercial environment I'd say.
Here they are around $40AUD including postage. There exist at least 4 , reputable Italian breeders in my State alone, with scores more interstate and the only restriction being movement _into_ West Australia.
And if a breeder isn't on a Federal and/or State biosecurity site no beekeeper of note would deal with them.

I have my own experience with this but just recently a fellow was boasting
his queen supply and what he had spent to startup. Didn't sell squat and
has not been heard of since, and we are smack bang in the middle of prime time queen sales.
I know I have offered my "slops" from emergency queen raising and never got a bite - most are just disease paranoid these days to exchange anything.
The market for newbies is however booming.

Bill


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

With that price I don't blame you. Lots of good reason to be sustainable in raising your
own queens. Because it is just too much details many will not go into it here. There are books devoted entirely on this subject alone. I will attempt to since I've almost practically experienced them all. There are many form of queen rearing including using eggs either in a natural comb cells or in the plastic queen cups. I will go into using the queen laying cage for getting the eggs. There is a post here that modify an old black comb frame to fit in the plastic laying cage. To do this successfully you have to widen the roaming space for the queen to lay in. Because without the needed young nurse bees the queen abdomen will shrink down inside this small confined laying cage. 
The second method is to use fresh drawn comb for the queen to lay in. QCs can be removed and placed inside a queen less hive for them to make the QCs. You have to be a bit careful to not crushed the QCs when removing and installing them into the mating nuc hives. For the cell builder hive I prefer to use an open system where enough hive resources are coming in preferably on a strong flow. If not then you have to supplement feed the hive. What I like to do is to find a booming hive with lots of foragers. If not enough foragers I will combine 2 forager hives into one cell builder/finisher hive. Then take out all the eggs/larvae frames to put inside a nuc hive along with the old queen. Don't mixed in different bees from different hives otherwise they will kill the old queen. The foragers will be returning to the cell builder hive. With the open larvae frames and the queen removed, take more cap brood frames along with the attaching bees from the near by hives to replaced the removed frames. What you want is a booming hive with lots of bees. Brush in more bees from other hives if there are not enough bees to cover the frames. This is call a bee bomb hive! 
The queens raised from the eggs stage will be more healthy, hardy and productive laying queens. All my queens this season are from the eggs stage raised queens for the II process. I used the natural comb method to produce these queens. 
The price per queen there is that US dollars or your country's dollars?


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## Saltybee (Feb 9, 2012)

Norbee,
I've do not know why but bees do not start with eggs. Prefer to eat them. Have not really played with attempts since I was more of a clunk than a keeper, so good luck.
Michael Bush has plenty of history to read and work from here; http://www.bushfarms.com/beesqueenrearing.htm

I've always thought of it as the hive withdrawing it's investment in the eggs and gambling it all on a few larva.


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## Norbee (May 8, 2016)

Beepro, with your cell builder, don't you end up with a large proportion of old bees, less apt to care for brood?

It's USD, and I'm not planning to sell only queens, but splits with my queens. The market for splits is crazy here now, 600 USD obtainable for a reasonable split. I have queens from good material, and will continue to graft some from elite queens. 

Not having success with rearing from eggs doesn't mean it's immpossible. Bush's site has a link to Alley's method, and he successfully used eggs. Might have found my answer right there, so thanks for the link. Queenless, broodless cell builder for minimum 10 hours before introducing eggs.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>Does anyone have experience in producing queens from cells with eggs instead of larvae 

I have experience at giving them eggs instead of larvae by both the Hopkins method and the Jenter method. I don't have any experience at actually producing any queens from them because the bees just remove them.


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## Norbee (May 8, 2016)

Interesting. I'll see if I play it safe with really young larvae or whether I'll try a batch with eggs ?


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

The bees have a lots of secrets that I have not yet know them all. The one who
can master this task will make lots of young healthy queens through out the 4 seasons. I'm presently experimenting on some winter II queens with the last batch of the early Fall drones raised here. It feels like summer in the high 80s but the weather can change really fast here. Winter is coming.
Here is my idea and it works wonderfully before on a flow. Combine all the pollen frames from the other hives into this foragers hive along with the attaching bees. Then put patty subs and syrup on the top bars. As you can see there are plenty of foods available when the flow (heathers) is on along with the extra pollen feeding frames. Chasing after the flow can also give you plenty of big fat well mated queens as well. Either use the graft cells or the eggs to put in. For the eggs, it is a bit tricky. You have to time the queen's laying at exactly 4 days for the hatched eggs. If not the bees will removed these eggs when you put them inside the CB (cell builder) since they are inside the wax/plastic cup cells now. So timing is extremely important. Once the eggs hatched into larvae then they will make QCs out of them. This is the difference between success and failure when using the eggs. So eggs they will removed while in larvae form they will not!
As to your question of using older bees, it is exactly the opposite. The newly emerged bees cannot feed RJ to the developing QCs yet. So the mid-aged bees are the one that I found will feed the QCs. The older foragers just know one thing that is to bring hive resources back to fuse these developing cells. A condition that you can create like an almost swarm hive but without a queen to swarm is what you are looking to make for the cell builder/finisher. Remember that the about to emerge cap broods also contribute to the next generation of young bees too. And there are plenty of them. Let's say, for example, you are using 3 deep boxes full of bees to condensed the bees into one bee bomb hive. Not enough then add more bees from another 3 deep hives since you have plenty of bees with that many hives now. How many older and newer bees you will have then? Check out you tube for the search term bee bomb (nuc) hive. The pics will be very eye opening. You can read up more on here http://www.glenn-apiaries.com/apimondia_1.html and a quote "Brood from other colonies is added every 2-3 days to keep the population strong and young." "In fact, any stock can be transformed to Cordovan color in two generations of a cross and back-cross to cordovan drones." Now the local carnis drones are in big trouble now that I got this red head/ultra yellow genetics.
Notice that the glass tube (vials) for the cap QCs inside an incubator are what I have adopted here as well. My glass vials are a bit larger and deeper but work just as well. Hundreds of them are thrown away in the garbage can everyday. Too small and not worth it to be recycled they said. They are free too and I got thousands of these reusable and pasteurize-able little vials for the cap QCs. Along with the QCs into the homemade mini fridge incubator they went. In time you will be the King of Queens producer there. Can you keep up with the busy bees schedule?

These are your next generation of productive queens so don't be too skimpy on the resources to make them. A devoted investment now will give you plenty the next season of harvest. Only accept cells that are at least 1.5" long and emerged virgin queens weighing around 150g. Doesn't has to be this standard if you don't want to. Mines are up to the queen standard!



These are mine:


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

Glass vials inside incubator:


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## Norbee (May 8, 2016)

They look good. Thanks for the info.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

I too have tried raising queens from eggs, they cannot be grafted as they are glued to the bottom of the cell, but I've done it by both cut cell and jenter. The bees don't go for it, you get a very poor take, maybe one in 10 if you are lucky. 

Bit of a mystery why bees would reject eggs, but there is a reason for everything, I just don't know what it is.

They do raise queens from eggs, because with natural supersedure or swarm cells, the queen is made to lay an egg in a pre built queen cell cup, and the bees then raise a queen from it. They just don't seem to like it much in artificial cells.


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## Norbee (May 8, 2016)

There might be some pheromone marking of the queen cells with eggs during swarming and supercedure. 

Have you tried cutting away half the height of the cells with eggs, too?


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Yes, would be interesting to know the role of pheremones in natural queen cells. Since the hive is dark and everything is done by chemical communication, there probably is a role.

When doing cut cell the cell walls are often destroyed, although I don't specifically remember if that happened when I tried eggs.


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## Norbee (May 8, 2016)

Alley writes about using eggs, and he has a drawing with several cells built. He writes of it being a problem with too many takes. Might have to experiment, but that's dependent on how much time I've got next season. Will share, in case I try.


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## Eikel (Mar 12, 2014)

I'm still curious on a difference within the first 12 hours. To some degree I can see the queenless scenarios but supersedure complicates the equation. 

Dang bugs are still playing stump the dummy and succeeding.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Well there's no better way than do the experiment yourself .


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## eltalia (Jun 12, 2017)

Oldtimer said:


> Well there's no better way than do the experiment yourself .


Exactly... to reiterate that which I have put before today in online bee focused forums? It is not at all difficult to reproduce conditions in testing
those statements oft made in posts. Having just recently proved a couple probably wholly false (as BS), I now - in learning - read with a *lot* of sceptism these largely introverted "bee keeping is local" anouncements.
One exception is pest and diseases. I am not about to import VM only to test the overwhelming ambuguities(sp?) on that topic. 
It goes like "those that can, do.. the rest g00gle".

Bill


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

I don't know how Alley does it. I've only tried it once and no takes. What I did was cut down the old dark 
comb down to about a 1/8" on the cells. The confined queen laid many eggs in these cells. Afterward the 
workers came along and ate all these eggs. I don't know why. I was hoping to graft some of these larvae too. I've seen a worker eating the eggs that the queen deposited on the cell wall outside the cell before. So workers do clean up these cells when they don't want to raise the QCs. Even when the queen had laid inside the queen cups, the eggs and developing larva in the cup can be clean out too. Maybe that they like this queen so much that they don't want a supersedure yet. So a strong queen will have a affect on how the workers behaved in the colony. That is why I said to invest more bee resources to make the next generation of the new queens. I'm sure you will find a way when you can time it out better.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>Alley writes about using eggs...

That's part of why I tried it, but Alley is leaving something out or he had selective memory...

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesalleymethod.htm#combs_to_use_in_obtaining_eggs
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesalleymethod.htm#prepare_for_queen-cells


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## Live Oak (Oct 11, 2008)

There is already 2 good systems for doing this. (raising queens from eggs) One is the Nicot system the other is the Jenter system. You can do this if you closely observe exactly when the queen lays but I think this would may not work as the nurse bees must first apply jelly for the eggs to hatch/as they hatch. Even then, not all the cups that get placed onto queen rearing frames and then into finisher hives are selected by the nurse bees to become queens. Percentages vary. I have been able to get the queen to lay eggs in 100% of the 110 cups in the Nicot box but not all of the cup cells are reared into a queen cell. Some are ignored by the nurse bees. I am still experimenting with various measures and techniques to increase the percentages of queen cells.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

I've used the nicot cage before. A post here that many do not like the set up.
I'm still trying to enhance the nicot cage set up. Going to widen the front so that more
nurse bees can get in with the queen. Have confidence that it will work better this time to
get the eggs. Instead of using newly emerged bees I will use majority of the foragers and 
older bees to make the QCs. There is a reason for that. Queen rearing is a fun experiment with
unlimited possibility and its improvement.


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## Norbee (May 8, 2016)

I found a Norwegian book "detailing" queen production from eggs, showing pictures of ok acceptance, and nice looking cells.

The builder:
When a colony fills a full box with bees in spring (because we winter in a single box in Norway), it's ready to be used as a builder. Remove the frame with the queen and put it above a queen excluder in a box with only empty frames. After 7 days, shake off some nurse bees to the box at the bottom board and remove the top box to another stand. This means the youngest larvae are 4 days old. The book says it's now ready to be used as a builder - no mention of a delay in time after making it up. At the time you're adding the eggs, feed 0,5 l diluted honey, directly onto frames (doesn't specify whether directly on bees or into empty cells, but I guess onto bees would give the most immediate reaction). Add eggs between two frames of brood.

The cells:
1 Miller method. Make cuts in a frame, preferably newly built, below eggs "of suitable age", and remove some of the eggs, so the QC won't be too close to each other. Remove larvae that are poorly fed after 2-3 days - can now be moved to a super of a strong colony, and positioned between two brood frames, while the builder can be reused. After 13 days, remove the cells, or put in cages for the queens to emerge, because they will start to emerge next day. Based on the information about the timing, I reckon the eggs should be so old that they're bending over.

2 Basically the same as above, but you cut out strips of eggs and glue onto frames for cell-building (three bars). Cut out a strip, preferably from a newly built frame, on one side remove wax to reduce the cups to half the height, and glue this side onto a bar. On the side facing down, remove two cells in between the eggs you want to keep, and bend the walls on the cells you want to keep outwards (probably to make it resemble QCs more). It states this job should be done in a heated room, but doesn't specify why - perhaps cold eggs are accepted poorly.

It doesn't mention any other special tricks and tips.


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## aran (May 20, 2015)

Norbee-> i had a crack at grafting queens this year..was super fun. Did I make the greatest queens in the history of beekeeping? probably not but was another fun part of a hobby i love so why not give it a go? Ill try it again next season with some more lessons learned from this years attempts.

Beekeeping has totally captivated me as a hobby . I love it and cant wait for the next how ever many years of learning that lay ahead.
Good luck with the queen rearing mate. I tried the cloake board method and the snelgrove board method this season--> all the queens produced that i kept have built up well and hopefully they survive winter...we will see!


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## Norbee (May 8, 2016)

That's good, aran. Seems like you're on your way for lots of experimenting too


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## aran (May 20, 2015)

Norbee said:


> That's good, aran. Seems like you're on your way for lots of experimenting too


Big error i made grafting this year's queens was not making the cell builder large enough and over cramming it with nurse bees. I will certainly be doing this next season following Michael Palmers method to the letter!


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## Norbee (May 8, 2016)

I read another Norwegian book about producing queens from eggs, so I guess it's not unattainable  It mentions cutting strips of eggs, but only details the use of a Jenter kit. 

Breeder:
Colony should be fed if there's not an ok flow. Trap queen in Jenter frame, and place in a brood frame in the center of the broodnest in the evening. In the morning, let the queen out. The book says that before 2,5 days have passed, the Jenter frame should be transferred to a starter, so that the eggs will hatch in the starter. (If you plan to use a Jenter frame, you should read a better description elsewhere).

Starter:
One brood box and one super. Remove five frames from the super, brush the bees on those frames into the brood box, remove super to another place with the opening in the opposite direction, put the queen some brood frames, some stores and empty frame(s) into the box. The box in the original place is the starter, and should have five frames of stores, 4 frames of brood, and space to put a frame in the middle of the brood. Feed, if there's not a good flow on. After 3-4 hours, add the cell cups with eggs. The starter should be packed with bees. Let the starter build cups and feed larvae for 1-2 days. After that, move it to a queen right finisher or recombine the starter with the queen below and excluder. If there's a flow, you can lift two brood frames from a strong hive into the super, insert the frame with cups between the brood frames, and get good care for 10 cells. Remember to remove any queen cells from the starter.

In other words, this starter will have larvae the right age to make queens from, but still they get a good take when inserting cups with eggs. The only commonality I see between the methods is using a queenless starter and making sure that starter is well fed. Otherwise, it's probably just the normal precations, starter overflowing with bees, enough young bees in the starter (maybe winter bees are not as good) etc.


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