# How many nurse bees does it take to make a queen cell?



## RobWok (May 18, 2011)

I was giving a lecture on queen rearing, (and using a bunch of slides I stole from Michael Bush, but I did give him credit) Anyway, I realized I was covering an important point, but had no data. How many nurse bees does it take to raise a queen? We all know you need a lot, but how many? The reason is this: In a walk away split, those bees are doing all they can to raise a bunch of emergency cells. Eventually though, all those are killed by the first queen to emerge so that work is mostly wasted. So, it's a matter of efficiency in raising queens. For example, if each nurse bee can create enough royal jelly to feed 2 other workers (they have to make more than enough to feed one, or hives would never increase) however, if it takes 200 nurse bees to make one queen cell based on Royal Jelly amount, for every time that you create a wasted queen cell in a walk away split, you have lost the potential of 400 workers. If there were 5 emergency cells in that split, you lost 1,600 potential workers.

So, every time you use a cell builder to create queens, and put them in a nuc with larva, you've just given them a leg up of over 1,000 bees? What if it's more than that? I don't know, and I couldn't find the data. Is it not a requirement of royal jelly, but worker potential? (more workers have to stay in the hive to feed than can go out and collect?)

Rob.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

Shame on your for not giving credit when credit is due!
Hee, he.
Anyways, I think it is the set up you are using that need to set the boundary a bit to give you more accurate estimation. For example, if it is a cloak or snelgrove board method I am sure there are many more nurse bees to nourish these queen cells. A 5 frame nuc set up is another measurement. But if only on a shake out method to build the bee bomb then it is hard to say because more nurse bees there. The other variables are that the nurse bees will need some time to make the RJ before depositing them into the cell cups. The timing between the first and 2nd or subsequent deposits I don't really know. Of course, the more nurse bees present the better. But as the bees aged they will turn into another task bees so no longer a nurse bee. The just hatch bees are not nurse bees yet. Bottom line is that there are too many variables that cannot be control or measured. But one frame of bees can make 2-3 good queen cells. So the approximate number is between 1000 to 2000. I have a frame of nurse bees with eggs/young larvae attached in a 5 nuc set up that do not make any queen cells. I am still questioning whether or not the old comb has anything to do with this issue.


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## AR Beekeeper (Sep 25, 2008)

In Canada, in 1975, two researchers named Liu Ying-Shin and S.C. Jay, raised queens in cages using only 200 nurse bees. I can't find a free copy of the study on the net. I read about the study in Giles Fert's book on breeding queens. So technically the answer to the question is 200 bees.

I wouldn't want to pay the going price for a queen and then find out she was raised by only 200 nurse bees!


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## ruthiesbees (Aug 27, 2013)

beepro said:


> I have a frame of nurse bees with eggs/young larvae attached in a 5 nuc set up that do not make any queen cells. I am still questioning whether or not the old comb has anything to do with this issue.


It is easier for them to rework new soft comb, so it can make a difference in how many cells or how good the cells look. If it's old brood comb, they have to float the larvae out to the face of the frame before they can make it turn down. In my TBH, the best queen cells get made on the bottoms or sides of the comb where it's easy to extend the wax. I still prefer to have the main hive make the queen cells (by pulling the old queen to a nuc) and then removing them once they are capped. That way I know I have a large group of nurse bees to feed the cells and plenty of wax makers.


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## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

Morse and Hooper said that a worker larva is visited 10,000 times from egg hatch to cell sealing. I can only imagine how many visits a queen larva requires.

So, I suppose 200 nurse bees could successfully rear a queen cell, but a quality queen?


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

If a typical worker larva got 10,000 visits before being capped, then I would guess that a normal queen cell will get at least 3x the number of visits than a regular worker larva.
Yes, the bees prefer to work on the soft wax to draw out the queen cells. You mention about a large group of nurse bees to feed the cells. Then would it be better to move the cells while in development onto the comb frames for the nurse bees to better feed them? There are more resources available on the comb frame than on the graft bar where the cells are at. 
I am not using the traditional shake out method but instead use a 5 frame nuc hive to finish the cells.


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

Michael Palmer said:


> Morse and Hooper said that a worker larva is visited 10,000 times from egg hatch to cell sealing. I can only imagine how many visits a queen larva requires.
> 
> So, I suppose 200 nurse bees could successfully rear a queen cell, but a quality queen?


Ive seen that number for a long time....and I don't really believe it.

10,000 visits over 6 days is more than a visit a minute. It is hard to watch this in a heavily populated observation hive....but I have put 24 post graft cells in an enclosed observation hive many times...the cups fill with royal jelly, but they are not getting visited once a minute.


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

I think the number of nurse bees can affect the size of the cell (at least according to allen dick), but I've had large, aparantly well fed queens come from small queen cells.


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## RayMarler (Jun 18, 2008)

How many nurse bees does it take to make a queen? Why would someone ask that question? Perhaps trying to minimise the populations in a cell starter/builder? I dunno, but sounds like that question is not the pertinent question to be asking about what it takes to make a decent or good quality queen. For the size of box being used, we need swarming condition population and heavy stores with incoming nectar and pollen, or simulated incoming, with enough nurse bees to do the work of being nectar handlers, larva feeders, house cleaners, etc. What number of nurse bees it takes is immaterial in the over all picture of trying to raise good queens. The number could be 200 (I doubt that number myself) or 2,000 or much more depending on all conditions of the operation. I think the correct answer would be to say... As many as it takes, per size of box being used and conditions inside it and the environment around the area.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

Not only the number of nurse bees but also the quality of the
feed that will affect the size of the cells. When the nurse bees are hungry they cannot produce the thick Rj required for these quality queens produced. That is why we put in the extra patties and syrup to make sure the nurse bees are well fed during the entire cell rearing process. As long as the nurse bees are well taken care of the quality queens are ensured. 
The size of the cells may depend on the size of the grafted larvae and the well fed nurse bees that have the excess Rj to deposit them in. I think as long as the cells are full of Rj to feed the queen larvae they will come out as quality queens. The size of the queen also varies according to their genetics.


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## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

deknow said:


> Ive seen that number for a long time....and I don't really believe it.
> 
> 10,000 visits over 6 days is more than a visit a minute. It is hard to watch this in a heavily populated observation hive....but I have put 24 post graft cells in an enclosed observation hive many times...the cups fill with royal jelly, but they are not getting visited once a minute.


I would expect you to disagree. Well, I would listen to Morse and Hooper before I would listen to you Dean. They both had a lifetime of experience, and you've had....??? And, do you really think that bees in an observation hive will perform the same as a normal sized colony? No way.


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## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

deknow said:


> I think the number of nurse bees can affect the size of the cell (at least according to allen dick), but I've had large, aparantly well fed queens come from small queen cells.



And Allen is wrong too? Sure Dean.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

I routinely see smaller queen cells and they, almost without exception, come from either a weaker builder or they are at the very end of a bar on a stronger builder and usually don't have their cups as full of rj. We typically cull them despite the fact that the emerging virgin will almost always be indistinguishable from one that comes from a longer cell. I don't have any proof the smaller ones are inferior but given that they probably had not been fed as well or perhaps been chilled a bit on a cold night it just doesn't seem prudent to use them.


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

Michael Palmer said:


> And Allen is wrong too? Sure Dean.


How do you read that as disagreeing with Allen? I posted a number of photos of large queens and the tiny cells they came out of...Allen's comment was that the number of bees working the cells affects the size of the cell itself. I could see that the queens were well fed (quantity wise...i have no way to test RJ quality), that they were large, and the cells were small.

I cited Allen because I've never heard anyone else make this claim, and it is the only explanation that fits my observations. I was not calling him 'wrong' (and I'm not sure how it could have been read that way).


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

Michael Palmer said:


> I would expect you to disagree. Well, I would listen to Morse and Hooper before I would listen to you Dean. They both had a lifetime of experience, and you've had....??? And, do you really think that bees in an observation hive will perform the same as a normal sized colony? No way.


Don't listen to me, do you own observation. When I hold a frame of calm bees covering brood, I don't see each brood being visited every minute.

I suspect that any observations that Morse made or referenced (Lindauer, etc) were made in an observation hive. I can imagine some high tech modern ways to look at this in the middle of an undisturbed broodnest, but nothing that Morse would have used. Observation hives are always problematic, but how do you think these observations are made?

Maybe in Roger's day he could still by X-Ray glasses from the back pages of a comic book...otherwise, he either observed a pulled frame or was using a observation hive.

I have observed plastic queen cups fill with RJ in an ulster observation hive over a couple of days without anything that looked like a visit more often than once a minute.


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

jim lyon said:


> I routinely see smaller queen cells and they, almost without exception, come from either a weaker builder or they are at the very end of a bar on a stronger builder and usually don't have their cups as full of rj. We typically cull them despite the fact that the emerging virgin will almost always be indistinguishable from one that comes from a longer cell. I don't have any proof the smaller ones are inferior but given that they probably had not been fed as well or perhaps been chilled a bit on a cold night it just doesn't seem prudent to use them.


Jim, these are all photographed with the cell they emerged from.


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## David LaFerney (Jan 14, 2009)

RobWok said:


> if each nurse bee can create enough royal jelly to feed 2 other workers (they have to make more than enough to feed one, or hives would never increase)


They have to make enough for more than one in their career - not necessarily at one time though.

Also - just to point out - those queens that are emerging from those dinky cells... The cells are pretty dinky, but not as dinky as they look like if you picture the cup as part of the cell - as it would be if it weren't grafted and cultured . Even so, you almost never see natural cells that small in a healthy hive.


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

Mark Winston, "Biology of the Honey Bee" page 97:



> ...Lindauer (1952) observed that an average larva was inspected 1926 times for a total of 72 min, but only fed during 143 visits. The time per feeding visit averaged 1.3 min for a total of 110 min feeding time per larva, or slightly under 2% of it's larval life. Other studies (Lineburg, 1924; Kuwabara, 1947) have shown higher values of up to 7200 visits or a maximum of 1140 feeding visits per larva, possibly because the amount of inspection and feeding may vary according to the ratio of larave to nurse bees. When the ratios of brood to nurse bees have been calculated, results show that a single nurse bee rears the equivalent of two to three larva during it's nursing lifetime.


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

David LaFerney said:


> They have to make enough for more than one in their career - not necessarily at one time though.
> 
> Also - just to point out - those queens that are emerging from those dinky cells... The cells are pretty dinky, but not as dinky as they look like if you picture the cup as part of the cell - as it would be if it weren't grafted and cultured . Even so, you almost never see natural cells that small in a healthy hive.


Well, a healthy hive raising a queen cell would by definition either be swarming or superceding, which are both generally done in times of abundance with resources the bees have allocated and not stimulated by the beekeeper.


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## ruthiesbees (Aug 27, 2013)

deknow said:


> Well, a healthy hive raising a queen cell would by definition either be swarming or superceding, which are both generally done in times of abundance with resources the bees have allocated and not stimulated by the beekeeper.


Or emergency replacement. I like to make my queen cells by pulling the queen of a booming hive over to a nuc and letting the hive raise lots of queen cells that I then split out to various places. That way they are well fed queens. I also make sure there is fresh new white comb on multiple bars for the queen to lay on. They rework that a lot easier than older brood comb.


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

I wouldn't consider such a hive 'healthy'...it has lost it's queen one way or another and it's future relies on a single queen successfully mating and returning to the original hive.


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

Does anyone have a reference for the Morse/Hooper '10,000 visits' claim? I've got the 'Illustrated Encyclopedia of Beekeeping' in front of me, and can't find it....or online.


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## BWrangler (Aug 14, 2002)

Hi Guys

Steve Taber talks writes about Liu/Peng's two studies, pg. 20, _Breeding Super Bees_. He says:

" , , , that 200 young nurse bees are sufficient to raise a good queen capable of mating and laying eggs. Queens reared under these conditions were compared with queens reared under normal conditions with little or no difference in production of eggs and brood."

More here: Liu, Ying-Shin and S.C.Jay._ 1975 Field studies of queen honey bees(Hymenoptera:Apidea) reared by small numbers of caged worker bees_. Can. Ent 107:705-709

It's not surprising that only 200 nurse bees can rear a good queen.

What's surprising is that beekeepers insert 100-120 grafted cups into a hive and can still get good queens(Morse). Getting 20000 nurse bees ready to take care of that many larva is expensive and time consuming, especially if repeated through an extended time frame.

My own experience, it's much easier to consistently rear quality cells using smaller hives with fewer bars grafted than the other way.

-dm


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## BWrangler (Aug 14, 2002)

Hi Guys

Another thought on queen cell length versus queen quality.

It's not so much the length of the cell that determines the quality of a queen, but the amount of royal jelly available to the queen. Longer, larger cells routinely have way more than enough royal jelly. Beekeepers get used to expecting these. And it's a quick visual check.

But shorter cells often contain more than enough as well. And that's easy to check when using plastic cups. It's surprising how short a cell can be and still have more than enough royal jelly left over.

-dm


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## RobWok (May 18, 2011)

RayMarler said:


> How many nurse bees does it take to make a queen? Why would someone ask that question? .


I asked because I was trying to determine the optimum way of raising queens. Say someone had only 5 hives. If they used the walk away split method, the bees in 5 of those splits could possibly make up to 100 queens. Since they were half sized hives, they may not be the best queens. Then, out of 100 queens, 95 would be killed by the first emerging queen.

On the other hand, if you grafted queens, or did something else where you only introduced say 10 grafts to get 5 good queen cells, you then only need the resources of one full hive to raise 5 quality queens. The rest of the bees go on about their business feeding larva. At the point the queens are about to hatch, then you make your splits. The end result is that you did not waste the resources used to feed 95 queens that would die. I was trying to help people get over the fear of grafting and other methods because it is so much more efficient than walk away splits. 

Rob.


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## RobWok (May 18, 2011)

In the example above, I was making the assumption of 20 emergency cells per hive. That number varies quite a bit. It was only for illustration purposes. I also think it a little bit risky to try to introduce a magnitude of 4 -5 x the number of queens a hive would raise. I've counted 24 emergency cells in one of my hives before, but also as low as 3. I try not to put more than 30 grafts for a single hive, and I provide sugar water and a patty. I know people try to do more, but I personally hand my nucs to my local customers. I have people coming back every year - sometimes because they mismanaged, but more often because they're either bringing a friend, or they would rather have me raise a queen than do it themselves (though I'm always trying to get them to try at least a walk away split the 2nd year). 

Here's another thing - if a queen is a poor layer, does she start out that way, or fail early? And if failing early means at year 3 instead of year 5, does that matter for folks that requeen often? I usually don't requeen until I see a problem. I had this one huge girl for almost 5 years and she was going like gangbusters the whole time.

Rob.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

BWrangler said:


> Hi Guys
> 
> Another thought on queen cell length versus queen quality.
> 
> ...


I would agree IF there is a rj surplus it's a moot point. My, observations are that there is a direct relationship between rj levels in queen cells 24 to 48 hours after grafting and the length of that cell when it is ultimately capped. I routinely cull such "runt" cells despite the fact that the virgins that hatch out of such cells look to me to be indistinguishable in size from a virgin hatching from a larger cell. 
So, is the product of the larger cell better? As I said earlier, I don't know, but cells are cheap and easily produced. I don't use them and I don't ask a customer to pay for them either, though when cells are in short supply I may throw them in as extras and tell them to do what they wish with them.


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## BWrangler (Aug 14, 2002)

Hi Guys

Well IF



there are enough healthy, well fed nurse bees.
they are motivated to raise a queen.
proper age larva are available.

then there's no problem. The bees will raise the best queens possible, in cells that are appropriately sized. Often, when stressed to replace a queen, a colony will pick an older larva, with a resulting smaller cell, than I would find acceptable.

Problems occur when bees are pushed to rear more queens, through an extended time-frame, than is naturally healthy. That's sometimes the case with commercial queen production. Jim, it's good to see someone exercising some kind of quality control in the process.

What's an acceptable length? Lots of contributing factors:



age of grafted larva.
type of bee
nurse bee care.

Mostly boils down to time.


larva pheromones/age trigger nurse bee feeding/capping behavior.
different kinds of bees develop at rates differing by up to 24 hours.
enough rj and proper hive environment.

And of course the experience to know how it works out.

When things go wrong, too small and too large cells result. It's very rare, but I've seen a few cells longer than 6". And one that was almost 8"! 

Did those big one produce a super queen? Nope. Just a big bunch of rj and a larva that failed to give off the proper odor at the right time.

-dm


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

I have never seen a 6-8" long cell before. 
The queen has her development cycle after being capped. She can only feed on so much
before she stop. And I don't know how many more days after capped that she will feed until she stop.
So I think that the quality of the Rj as well as the quantity is
very important to make a better queen. The size of the cell will only tell you how much Rj got deposited. It does not tell you
what is the quality of the Rj. Is it during a flow and the nurse bees are all well fed through out this process?
There are some Rj that are a bit watery while some are thicker inside the cells. 
I would guess that the thicker Rj is more nutritious for the larva and will make better laying longer living queens. And genetics play
a big role here. There are so many factors including the positioning of the cells inside the hive that can affect the making of a better queen. 
Whatever you do make sure your nurse bees are all well fed.


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## RayMarler (Jun 18, 2008)

Hi Rob,
I think I did not get my point across, that happens a lot with me as I'm not very good at expressing what I'm thinking I guess.

My point is that it takes a lot more than just 200 nurse bees to make a good queen. It takes stores, and flows, and combs to name just three. For example, I could make up a three frame nuc with a frame of nectar on one side, a frame of pollen on the other side, with a cell bar frame with a single queen cell, or maybe three, and put right in the middle. Dump in 200 less than ten day old nurse bees and let them do their thing. They may or may not make a good queen. I can't say as I've never done it. The reason I haven't is that I'd rather try stacking the deck more in my favour of having success. I could do the same thing but shake in nurse bees off of two or three frames and have much better chance of success. Swapping the resulting nuc in the place of a stronger nuc or hive would create even more chance for success. It may just take 200 or whatever number of nurse bees to feed the queen cell, but I think there is more to raising good cells than just that.

I hear what you are saying, grafting or other cell building methods make much better queens and more at a time, and is much more efficient than just walk away splits. I totally agree. But, I would rather tell you what I've done successfully than try to speculate on how many nurse bees it takes. I have successfully raised 5-12 queen cells in five frame medium nucs and in four frame deeps. The emerged virgins were large and fat, well fed princesses. I made up the nuc with good stores, with sealed brood, no queen viable eggs or younger larva, and fairly full of nurse bees. I made these up from two story nucs, removing one story with the queen and younger larva and eggs to a new location. At that time I put in a frame of eggs into the resulting cell builder nuc. I did this to get the bees primed into making royal jelly. Three days later I removed that frame and put a grafted cell bar in its place. Ten days later I placed the cells into nucs made up that day. Three days later I checked and found nice fat well fed virgins. I think you can raise several nice queens in a three frame nuc, but feel four or five frames would be better chance of good success. It's a risk/reward thing, or it's about if I'm going to try, let me try to have the best success that I can for the time and resources involved.


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## Ryan Williamson (Feb 28, 2012)

My only observation with small queen cells did not go well. I had the pleasure of hosting a Glenn carni breeder queen for a friend and some how she died in transit to my place. In desperation I over grafted from the frame of eggs that was left despite knowing better due to the summer dearth. Yep small cells produced good looking virgins who mated well and had great brood patterns. That one batch of queens nearly all died the following winter accounting for the majority of my losses. Was it small pourly fed cells or poor summer dearth mating? I don't bother to fool with small cells anymore.


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## RobWok (May 18, 2011)

Thanks guys. I guess there's not really been any scientific research on it. The 200 nurse bees sounds legitimate. In the end, I'm still of the opinion that raising queens deliberately and methodically is more efficient than allowing the bees to randomly create cells and then allowing all but one to be culled. I was hoping for a cool statistic - something like: If you put one queen cell in a nuc, instead of doing a walk away split, and you do this before the honey flow, the difference is 8 lbs of honey by the end of the season kind of thing. I knew about the mass of nurse bees and the like. I use cloak boards, and limit my cells to 20 or so per hive. Usually, they'll take 25% of my grafts, and since I'm not too careful with my larva frames, the ones on either side of my grafts will have a few queen cells as well. Those, and my grafts go in a 4 divided queen castle and are fed all the way up until I put them in nuc boxes. So, I've had a wonderful start to the year thus far - and have hit the weather just right for each stage. I can't wait to see how many queen cells turn into laying queens. I have 26 hatching out now.

Rob.


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## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

deknow said:


> Does anyone have a reference for the Morse/Hooper '10,000 visits' claim? I've got the 'Illustrated Encyclopedia of Beekeeping' in front of me, and can't find it....or online.


My papers got shuffled and I mis-attributed the quote to Morse and Hooper. I found it again in The Hive and the Honey Bee, p. 212, ninth printing, 1987.

"During the 8-day period from the laying of the egg until the full grown larva is sealed within its cell, Lineburg (Nelson _et al.,_1924) found that nurse bees visit individual larvae an average of about 1,300 times daily - more than 10,000 visits in all. On the last day before the cell is capped, they visit it nearly 3,000 times, spending a total of 4 3/4 hours within the cell. Lindauer (1953) calculated the time for rearing one larva from the time the egg is laid to the capping of the cell, and also, the number of bees that were involved: 2,785 bees spent 10 hours, 16 minutes, and 8 seconds in caring for the cell and the larva during the period."

Now while your careful research into this matter...while holding the comb in your hands...doesn't reflect what is written here, I have to ask. Do you really think that bees perform on a comb that has been removed from the colony in the same way as a comb that is in the hive and undisturbed?


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

I would think it would be virtually impossible to calculate. When I pull a frame of uncapped cells I expect them to be a mass of bees with the underlying cells not even visible.


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

> Now while your careful research into this matter...while holding the comb in your hands...doesn't reflect what is written here, I have to ask. Do you really think that bees perform on a comb that has been removed from the colony in the same way as a comb that is in the hive and undisturbed?


Of course not. The Nelson 1924 reference used 10min observations in an observaton hive...one that was 10 frames wide with 1 glass side. Brood frames from the interior of the brood nest were moved ('disturbed') to the outer position so they could be....observed. Didn't you just discount my observations because they were made an an observation hive?

I don't know how to reconcile the two references cited. The first claims an average of 30 seconds per visit...the second cites about 10 hours of care. 10x60=600 minutes of care.....at 2 visits per minute you end up with 1200 visits?

There seems to be some confusion (which the way the book is written makes worse). Your first citation discusses "visits", and includes those where nothing appears to take place and lasts less than 2 seconds..the second is talking about care and feeding.

Given that in a healthy hive with brood the open brood is mostly c9vered with bees walking on the c9mb, and there is no space between cells, I'm not sure what observation would constiute a "visit".


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

jim lyon said:


> I would think it would be virtually impossible to calculate. When I pull a frame of uncapped cells I expect them to be a mass of bees with the underlying cells not even visible.


Jim, much of this has to do with how we raise queens (cell bar frame). If you observe natural queen cells on comb (or press a grafted cup into some comb) they are not clustered and hanging off the cell (s). I think this is more like bees clustering on a top bar or in a package....empty space and queen cells to care for.


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## dsegrest (May 15, 2014)

RobWok said:


> I was giving a lecture on queen rearing, (and using a bunch of slides I stole from Michael Bush, but I did give him credit) Anyway, I realized I was covering an important point, but had no data. How many nurse bees does it take to raise a queen? We all know you need a lot, but how many? The reason is this: In a walk away split, those bees are doing all they can to raise a bunch of emergency cells. Eventually though, all those are killed by the first queen to emerge so that work is mostly wasted. So, it's a matter of efficiency in raising queens. For example, if each nurse bee can create enough royal jelly to feed 2 other workers (they have to make more than enough to feed one, or hives would never increase) however, if it takes 200 nurse bees to make one queen cell based on Royal Jelly amount, for every time that you create a wasted queen cell in a walk away split, you have lost the potential of 400 workers. If there were 5 emergency cells in that split, you lost 1,600 potential workers.
> 
> So, every time you use a cell builder to create queens, and put them in a nuc with larva, you've just given them a leg up of over 1,000 bees? What if it's more than that? I don't know, and I couldn't find the data. Is it not a requirement of royal jelly, but worker potential? (more workers have to stay in the hive to feed than can go out and collect?)
> 
> Rob.


I am a big fan of Michael Bush, but I think he learned his math from another person of the same last name. I think you did too.


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

Here is the nelson reference in full (witout diagrams)
https://archive.org/stream/growthfeedingofh1222nels/growthfeedingofh1222nels_djvu.txt

Anyone have a copy of the Lindauer reference? I can't find a copy easily. Note that it is the same source that Winston cites in my post where I quoted him. The English translation can be found in: Bee World 34, 63-90 ...i don't have a copy available.


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

jim lyon said:


> I would think it would be virtually impossible to calculate. When I pull a frame of uncapped cells I expect them to be a mass of bees with the underlying cells not even visible.


In this day and age (the Arduino age), I can think of a number of ways to measure a couple of things for less than $100.

A coil of wire around the plastic cup will be able to measure capacitance of the inside of the cell...data that if properly parsed should be able to tell us when a bee is actually in the queen cell (and how deep she goes in the cell, and how long she stays in the cell....this could take place in the middle of an undisturbed brood nest.

A modified Miller observation hive should allow one to observe a queen cell from the inside (might not get it right the first time, but should't be too hard to set it up).

There are other kinds of sensors that could be used (contact, temp, light, etc)...but the coil is probably the least invasive.


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## Sunday Farmer (Nov 13, 2013)

Dean,
If I tell everyone I visited you, they would assume we went through a beeyard together, chatted bees. If I say I visited my mother, people would assume we had dinner together. If I visit the post office, few minutes I got stamps. If I visit a website, 30 seconds, maybe a few minutes. What is a visit to a bee? Maybe very well 10,000 visits. My thoughts as I was in the shop today. The other was- a lot of us sell queens. I would accept the statement about a large queen from a small cell if there was a gram scale under her at emergence. Maybe, after 8 hours as she has been fed by attendents, weigh again. Do you think that would give a better idea of how well fed she was, if indeed she was? Even better, carry out a large sample both with small cells from nucs, and properly made cells. Then we can make a better statement if in fact large, well fed queens, can come from large cells. My interest in this convo is more the practical. I sell queens, you do, others on here do. What would my customers like: 3 queens, all from the same mother line. Best line in my apiary. Daughter 1, was from an overfed cell builder, daughter 2, I removed the queen and allows the original hive to make their own queen, daughter three, I put a frame of eggs/larvae in a small nuc box. IMO, that is the practical point, and if quoting size, emergence weight is objective.


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## VikingJim (Apr 26, 2015)

How many nurse bees does it take to make a queen cell? 

1, 2, 3, Three! (referencing a really old Tootsie - pop commercial starring an owl) 

:lpf: sorry, I just crack me up.


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## jcolon (Sep 12, 2014)

OMG, I just clicked this thread to do the same. Tootsie pops are the best.


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