Part 1

Raising Queens in Cary, NC

About five weeks ago, we began an exciting process, raising our own queen bees! Queens are, naturally, the most important bee in the hive. She controls whether a colony blooms into tens of thousands strong or dwindles into empty combs, and her daughters are wholly committed to aiding the process.

Our process of creating these super hero’s begins by selecting a worthy mother. Just like people, every queen is unique and possesses her own unique traits. Of course, the idea is, we seek to replicate those traits by creating new queens from her eggs. If all goes well, her daughters can hope to inherit some of those traits. Easier said than done, but we try!

In this case, we started with a Golden West queen purchased last year. These queens are from a well respected breeder, Randy Oliver, and are known for their survival strength. And this queen has survived. She came out of winter strong, untreated, and thrived through spring; creating comb for 10 deep frames, filling them with honey and never getting the impulse to swarm. The colony appears to have kept mites low with zero human intervention. Only one mite was found in their last sample almost a year into their colony, not to mention they survived the hive being tipped over! And even after all of that, they’re calm! These are the sort of traits we look for.

Now that we’ve found our mother, time to make daughters! The queen chooses whether to fertilize an egg or not when she lays it, and this is based on the size of the cell in the comb. The majority of her eggs are female, and any female egg has the potential to become a queen. It’s all based on one thing, the quantity of royal jelly they are fed in the first days of their transition from egg to larvae. The feeding must begin within 24 hours of this transition, and the sooner the better, so timing is of great importance. For this reason, we isolate the queen in a special cage small enough for the workers to fit through, but too small for her. Inside she is given a fresh, perfect frame of comb ready for egg laying. Once she is placed into this special frame, the clock starts ticking.

In 4-5 days depending on her mood, there will be 1,000+ larvae on that frame that are all the same age and ready for their special journey from commoner, to royalty!

(Follow along for the next steps in the journey!)