July 10 2023

I’ve never attempted a full queen rearing cycle, it’s extremely time intensive and sensitive, deadlines are very punctual. While I may not have the bandwidth to attempt to produce over 20 queen bees on my own, I should be able to apply some of the same technical concepts to raise queens in small queen-less colonies. I selected three queen-less hives with no eggs and ability to produce a supersedure cell on their own. Next I took an empty frame and inserted five plastic queen cups in each, all in the bottom third of the frame. I identified one of my strongest hives with lots of eggs and growing population, and I drew out a frame and shook the bees. I grafted eggs from this hive into all the frames with added cups. The grafting process is arduous, I did most of it without my veil to have better vision, grafting was much harder when I started getting bombarded by neighboring hives. It makes a lot more sense to do this in the spring when hives are more docile. I finished the grafting process and swapped these frames into my queen-less hives. For a safety measure I threw in a full frame of eggs donated from two other hives to increase chances of re-queening regardless of the success of the grafting. I will check back in 10 days to check their progress.