Part 2

Raising Queens in Cary, NC

Our next step is to create a special colony created for the sole purpose of making queen cells. We call it a cell builder. The most important element in making queens is royal jelly. This is a unique substance found only in the beehive, produced by a special gland in the head of the colonies youngest bees. It converts nectar and pollen into a nutrient packed super food we call royal jelly. Worker bees are fed this substance for about 3 days, while queens receive it for 9 and almost 1,600x more of it! So we must create the conditions for the bees to produce as much royal jelly as possible.

We start by removing the queen from the colony, which creates a pheromone change in the colony. With no queen, the bees become desperate to create them. We also organize the hive very intentionally to give them no other larvae or eggs that could potentially become a queen, we only want them to work on the larvae we provide. Next we find a frame absolutely packed with pollen to create fresh royal jelly. And if necessary, we feed them sugar syrup if no nectar flow is available. Last but not least, we need young bees! It’s estimated we’ll need 200 bees for each cell we create, and crowded conditions seem to create the best cells, so we want to pack the hive full! We do this by finding frames of young larvae in other hives and shaking those bees onto a cloth covered ramp. These young bees are known as nurses, they have never flown or left their hive. When the frame is shaken onto the ramp, the older bees fly home and the nurses march right into their new home. We like to shake 10-15 frames into our cell builder colonies depending on how many bees are on the frames. We keep strong hives nearby to pull bees from for this purpose, the loss of a few hundred bees is not difficult for them to recover from.

All of this has been done the day before we plan to put our larvae in the hive. This 24 hour period lets the bees get to know each other, settle in and all know one thing, that they need a queen!

We return to our queen and her frame. By now the eggs have come larvae and are just beginning to be fed their first dose of royal jelly. Right on schedule! We carefully place the queen back into the hive and take the frame with us. This next process is known as grafting. We use a special frame filled with individual cups that mimic how the bees would raise a queen in nature. There are 4 bars and 15 cups on each bar. With a small tool, we are able to scoop the larvae up out of the cell, and lay them down in the bottom of the cup. These larvae are only slightly larger than a grain of sand and require great care when being moved, so this is one of the most difficult parts of the entire process. With all the bees removed the frame is placed on a table at an angle, and the larvae are moved as quickly as possible so they do not dry out. The moment the process is done, we open the cell builder, place them inside right next to the pollen and close it up. With that done, a major milestone is completed on our end, and the process is given over to the bees. And bees, as any beekeeper knows, can be slightly unpredictable….

(Follow along for next steps on the journey!)