# Queen bank



## flyingbrass (Jul 2, 2011)

How does he secure the queen cages so they don't chew out/in?


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## The Honey Girl's Boy (Jul 26, 2009)

The corks are still in, the candy hasn't been inserted yet.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>Our local large beekeeper has a nuc every spring that he puts a frame full of queen cages in that he buys. The workers care for all these queens until he needs them. What motivates the workers to feed and care for all these different queens? Why don’t they cluster with one queen and ignore all the others? When I bought one of his queens, I got a look in the nuc and it looks like a normal hive with workers crawling around no with clustering. 

What matters is that they do. If you make some bees queenless and give them a bunch of stranger queens in cages that were caged near the same time they will care for most all of them. If you add more queens later that were caged later, they usually kill the older queens and care for the new queens. It seems to be driven by the pheromones given off by the queens. The new ones were laying more recently and make more pheromones.


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## flyingbrass (Jul 2, 2011)

so I've got the same plan, is 24 hours the best time to leave the nuc queenless before adding 4 queen cages?


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>so I've got the same plan, is 24 hours the best time to leave the nuc queenless before adding 4 queen cages? 

I go for overnight, which sometimes ends up 12 hours and sometimes ends up 24 hours. There seems to be something about overnight that the bees have time to sort things out at night and are too busy to do so in the daytime. After overnight they seem to be about the maximum acceptance of a new queen.


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## jonlorusso (Apr 25, 2011)

How long can you keep the queens in there? Can you supplement with frames of brood to keep the queen bank going? Is that the right way to keep it stable?


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

You can supplement with brood. Oddly enough, they will raise a queen usually and, contrary to my expectations, so far they have not killed my other queens when they have done that. I usually cage her or put her in another small nuc and let them raise another...


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

I can't say it's optimum, but I have experimented partly because of my bafflement at queens that came in packages that didn't lay for two weeks and I assumed it has to do with being banked. Yet even when I banked them for four or five months they queens would start laying in a day or two when introduced to a colony and they did fine. I think the issue is how SOON you bank them, not how long. They do not do well when you bank them as soon as they have laid an egg or two. They do much better if you let them lay for two or three weeks.


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## AstroBee (Jan 3, 2003)

Michael Bush said:


> They do much better if you let them lay for two or three weeks.


Thank you for this nugget. Its really hard getting this kind of info.


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## SWM (Nov 17, 2009)

I'm familiar with how to bank queens and have done so many times, usually 10-15 using a queenless 5 frame nuc. My question is this: How many queens can I bank in a 10 frame queenless hive. Of course I'll be adding frames of emerging brood every so often to replenish the nurse bees. I've got 40+ queens that I need to bank for an extended period. Please share your experience...thanks.


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## Lauri (Feb 1, 2012)

I made this banking frame last year..just thought I'd share the design. Holds any kind of queen cage or roller cage. Was pretty easy to put together.


















The band you see is bungee cord material..tight but stretchy.


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## rharlow (Mar 20, 2011)

If making a split, can you also bank a couple of queens in the new split with new queen?


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

I think it works best if all the queens are on a equal footing especially while they are accepting them. All caged works.


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## Nature Coast beek (Jun 10, 2012)

Here's a pic of Oldtimer's queen bank from his epic thread, Raising Queen Cells Without Grafting. I think it's pretty tight and the thread was worth another look.


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## Nature Coast beek (Jun 10, 2012)

@Lauri

That bank looks pretty easy to make and very functional, both great qualities. :thumbsup:


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