# Wanting to learn,so will this work?



## Robert166 (Mar 12, 2005)

Saw this in the new Betterbee catalog, any comments? Hope the link works!  


http://www.betterbee.com/products.asp?dept=631

New queens are now up to around $10.00 each, so it doesn't take long to see why a Queen Rearing Kit makes sense. Now you can raise as many queens as you want - all with no grafting! Plus, you are always sure of the age of the eggs that you want the bees to make into queens. Our Queen Rearing Kit comes with a Queen Box, 110 Cell Cups, and 2 Bars with 20 Cell Bar Fixtures and 20 Cup Holders installed. (Ship Wt: 2 lbs.)

How to use:

1. Place the Queen in the Laying Box (the bedroom) - it contains the Plastic Cell Cups (the only place that the Queen can lay her eggs.
2. After 24 hours, take the Queen out of the Laying Box and select some of the egg-filled Cell Cups for your queen starting colony,
3. Place these Cell Cups on the Cell Cup Holder in your Queen Starting Frame, The bees will feed the eggs royal jelly so that they will become queens.


----------



## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

Let me just say...

When someone tells you..."All ya gotta do is"...

You should hear bells and whistles go off. Don't forget, grafting is about the easiest part in the queen rearing process. Investing is a divise to make a simple procedure more simple, and at the same time add a significant degree of failure, is an all ya gotta do kind of a thing.

My opinion, of course.


----------



## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesqueenrearing.htm

I've been using the Jenter. It works well, but queen rearing is more than just grafting (or avoiding grafting).

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesbetterqueens.htm


----------



## beegee (Jun 3, 2003)

If queen rearing was easy, everybody would do it. It takes time, work, and attention to time, and work and attention to details. Timing is everything. I am going to try to raise some queens this year because I am really tired of trying to find any that are available when I need them.


----------



## BjornBee (Feb 7, 2003)

>>>"New queens are now up to around $10.00 each,"

For a quality queen thats produced by a beekeeper/operation who is doing everything correct, thats dirt cheap.

Having dedicated mating nucs, using resources that could be used for honey/pollination, time grafting, figuring failure rates for grafts, mating flights, culling the bad, etc., all cost something.

Then there is the phone call from the customer, the follow up phone call to answer questions forgotten the first time, processing the credit card, filling out the mailer, the trip to the post office, more gas and time, etc, 

I'm not complaining. If people did not make money at queen rearing, they would be nuts to continue. But I honestly do not see how selling queens for 10 dollars or less can even be profitable. (Maybe for the ones paying cheap foriegn labor and producing thousands of queens a week, they can make a buck. But I wonder about quality sometimes.)

I have openly stated many times that more beekeepers should raise queens. Maybe then more beekeepers would realize how many things could go wrong, how many losses there could be, and how producing quality queens, is harder than buying a kit in a mag.

I mainly cater to the smaller beekeeper. Many orders are for one or two. In the production time, the equipment to make one queen, catching, caging, mailing, talking on the phone, associated costs, etc., I could easily "use up" 10 dollars of expenses.


----------



## Chef Isaac (Jul 26, 2004)

queen rearing is tough. It is the understanding of it all and trouble shooting. 

It is a long joureny but if you read, read, read, and ask a lot of questions along with maye talking a queen rearing class and getting all the equipment then you will be on your way!

Good Luck!


----------



## George Fergusson (May 19, 2005)

In my first season (spring 2005) I ordered two $10 queens from a reputable and respected dealer in Florida who really wanted to sell me 100 queens. Anyways, they arrived dead, apparently from heat prostration during shipping. I was liable for the shipping which came to about $12 if I recall.

Since then I've come to realize that I don't *want* to buy queens (or bees) "from away" as my needs will be better served by raising my own queens and bees, conditioned for my geographic area. I may from time to time introduce some foreign genetics as long as they come from northern areas of the country. No offense to my southern friends, but I don't want their bees and to be honest, they probably don't want mine either.

Bjorn is right and I don't think you're going to find $10 queens in small quantities any more, maybe not even in large quantities. You might, but I'd suspect their quality- they'd have to be mass produced to sell at that price and I'm just skeptical of anything mass produced. Having raised a few queens of my own, I can attest to the time and attention not to mention the hive resources and the inevitable failures involved in raising good queens. I intend to raise more queens in the future, primarily for my own use, but I look forward to selling some too and I won't be letting them go for less than $25 each and at that, I don't expect to make a lot of money at it. I also don't expect to be shipping any queens so my market will be limited to people within driving distance. At that, there are quite a few folks, hobbyists mostly, that have expressed an interest in quality locally raised queens and they're willing to pay just a little bit more for them. I already have a friend a few towns over, one of two certified organic beekeepers here in the state of Maine; he wants my queens, as many as I can produce. He's got 20 or so hives and is planning on expanding.

>If queen rearing was easy, everybody would do it. 

Beegee, queen rearing IS easy and everybody USED to do it. It isn't hard, the bees actually do all the hard stuff, we just "facilitate" the process by giving them the means, the resources, and the opportunity. It isn't rocket science, it just requires some basic knowledge and attention to detail. Raising one's own queens used to be par for the course, a trend I'm happy to say that appears to be coming back.


----------



## beegee (Jun 3, 2003)

Queen rearing is easy if you have the time, dedication and equipment to do it on a large scale. Most hobby beekeepers just don't or won't. Somewhere the decision is made to take the plunge, build the stuff, make the plan.

My idea is that why invest all the time and money to it if queens are cheap and available? Problem is, they ain't cheap any more and they aren't available. That's why I plan to raise my own from now on.


----------



## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

Queen rearing is a great thing to undertake. It will teach you MUCH about bees that you will never learn otherwise.


----------



## Robert166 (Mar 12, 2005)

The 10 dollar price was a copy and paste from Better bees website; the new catalog says 20 dollars a queen. But I thank you for your comments.


----------



## Spigold (Jul 31, 2004)

It was mentioned about the bees used for queen rearing. A smaller number of hives could conceivable be used for a few (+/- 60) cells. One, if you grafted off of the same hive that you used as the cell builder (a real boomer). With little specialized equipment. A grafting tool, cell cups and the frame to hold them. Then mating them in a splits made into your standard equipment. These queens could be used any way you see fit. 

But raising multiple rounds of many cells or one large round requires a tremendous amount of bees. Cell builders need to be very large to ensure that the larvae are well cared for. The earlier in the season you start the more hives too combine to get that strength. Then you have to mate them and that takes more bees. 

Also remember that the bees used for queen rearing could have been making a honey crop. Just remember, nothing is free.

I think, scale is an important question to ask yourself. Generally speaking the larger the endeavor the greater the specialization of equipment. Not including the small guys that like to tinker and build.

The first scenario, could be easily done with little extra labor and provide all the queens a small operation would need. Best of all there seems to be almost infinite choices in scale and specialization. 

Queen rearing is a fascinating aspect of beekeeping and offers the participants added insights into honeybees

Cheers!


----------



## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

It's true if you want to rear a lot of queens throughout the season it will make a major dent in your production, but if you only want queens to requeen your own hives or make your own splits, you can use good timing (like two weeks or so before the flow) to pull a queen from a strong hive and put her in a nuc and use that queenless hive for a starter/finisher. During the flow they will be without open brood and will make MORE honey. Use the hives you wish to requeen for mating them.


----------



## Jeffrey Todd (Mar 17, 2006)

>use that queenless hive for a starter/finisher.

By doing that I assume you mean let one hive raise a number of (emergency) cells and then distribute the ripe cells to several other colonies. Will this cause an inbreeding problem later on down the line if you do it several times, especially in an apiary with only 10 or so colonies?
Thanks,

Jeffrey


----------



## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>By doing that I assume you mean let one hive raise a number of (emergency) cells and then distribute the ripe cells to several other colonies.

Not necessarily. I just meant if you time it right you can get MORE honey. If you raise queens all season you'll get less honey.

> Will this cause an inbreeding problem later on down the line if you do it several times, especially in an apiary with only 10 or so colonies?

When raising a few queens for yourself, most people graft from their best queen and expect the drones to come from a variety of sources.

I'd probably do the Hopkins method before I'd just do emergency cells. Emergency cells are sometimes in clusters that are hard to separate and that's on wax. On plastic it's hopeless.


----------



## Aspera (Aug 1, 2005)

I would just like to add that I have had excellent luck using the Miller method. While I only raised 8 queens last year, they were all of the highest quality and it required no special investment of money or equipment to do so.


----------



## Focus on Bees (Mar 6, 2006)

Heres an idea that I had today. Could a guy build a queen rearing kit himself ? I thought about making a special frame with window screen on one side and wire mesh box if you will on the other side. Then you could take these queen cups with the peg and stick them through the window screen to hold them while the queen lays in them. afterwards you could take them out and put them in the finisher colonies using the regular queen rearing frame with the groove in it. I just thought instead of buying a kit for $50.00 that I could make one instead. What do you great minds out there think ?


----------



## honeyman46408 (Feb 14, 2003)

"I just thought instead of buying a kit for $50.00 that I could make one instead"

I wonder how long someone worked to make thoes kits work?

IMHO spend the 50 bux


----------



## Jeffrey Todd (Mar 17, 2006)

>I'd probably do the Hopkins method before I'd just do emergency cells. Emergency cells are sometimes in clusters that are hard to separate and that's on wax. On plastic it's hopeless.

Good point. I hadn't thought about that.
Thanks for the tips and your very useful website. Ease and practicality are very nice attributes of any system of doing something.


----------



## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>Could a guy build a queen rearing kit himself ?

If you don't want to buy the kit and you don't want to graft, I'd do the Hopkins or Miller method. For only a little more work you can do Jay Smith's Better Queens method. 

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesqueenrearing.htm
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesbetterqueens.htm

It takes a lot of very detailed small parts and good fitting to make a Jenter or equivalent system.


----------



## Sport (Dec 11, 2006)

For a person who is just starting out in this hobby, me, is queen rearing really something that I should be looking at? Or should I just worry about getting through the first year or two and then look to raise my own queens. I'm reading all this stuff and it seems to me that this is more for someone who is in need of many queens, not just one or two. But, on the other hand, if having a nuc or two at the ready with locally mated queens will help my hives, then why not.

"The underlying concept of queen rearing is to get the most number of queens from the least resources."

This sounds right for a producer, but as a hobbiest I don't mind spending my resources for the health of my hives. I don't want to spend the hives resources, though.


----------



## BjornBee (Feb 7, 2003)

If you want a cheap queen rearing kit, make a cell frame from scrape wood, make queen cups as many did years ago using a properly prepared dow rod, use a piece of wire for a grafter. Many beekeepers used these items over the years.

I like using the wax cells, the wooden cell cups holders, and other queen rearing stuff from Kelleys. Much lower cost.

Queen rearing for a few queens does not need to be expensive or require much in the way of fancy tools and gadgets.


----------



## BerkeyDavid (Jan 29, 2004)

Sport said:


> For a person who is just starting out in this hobby, me, is queen rearing really something that I should be looking at? Or should I just worry about getting through the first year or two and then look to raise my own queens. I'm reading all this stuff and it seems to me that this is more for someone who is in need of many queens, not just one or two. But, on the other hand, if having a nuc or two at the ready with locally mated queens will help my hives, then why not.


Sport if it is your first year then don't worry about making queens. IMO if you want to do anything the first year do a walkaway split.

Because you will be learning lots just dealing with them.

But like someone else mentioned, you really learn even more once you try to graft or otherwise raise a few queens.

And you are right, it is really great to always have a nuc or two around with a new queen ready to go if you need her.


----------



## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>>"The underlying concept of queen rearing is to get the most number of queens from the least resources."

>This sounds right for a producer, but as a hobbiest I don't mind spending my resources for the health of my hives. I don't want to spend the hives resources, though.

All you have to do to get a queen is put a frame of open brood and bees and a frame of honey in a two frame box and come back in 24 days to find a mated queen (usually). But they will have reared several other queens that got killed by the one that mated. Queen rearing is an attempt to get better queens and avoid the waste.


----------

