Making new honeybee colonies with queen cells

I've been reading some old queen rearing books that you can get for free on Google Play Books. Practical Queen Rearing (Pellett, 1918) is a very good book that covers the basics, some well known queen rearing systems, and his own
methods. One of his ideas is to make up mating nucs over a queen excluder on top of a queenright colony. His claim is that you can get your queens mated this way without reducing the productivity of the queenright colony.

I had a couple of ripe queen cells from a grafting experiment, so I tried Pellett's method today.

Two accepted queen cells out of ten is not very good, but it was my first try at grafting. I took a colony that had 15 frames and compressed them down to just five frames by removing almost all of the open brood and honey. There were a few cells started on the frames that I left, so I must not have removed all of the brood.

The cell cups in the picture are made in three pieces: a brown base that is nailed onto the bar, a white cup holder that is a friction fit on the base, and a little amber cup that holds the larva. I described the Chinese grafting tool in another post. It is a tiny, flexible spatula that lets you scoop up a larva and move it into the cup. A queenless colony will treat any larva in a downward facing cup as a started queen cell and will finish the job. At least that is the idea. The benefit of using the plastic queen cups is that you can just unplug the finished cell and transfer it to another colony before it hatches out.

The green box has two frames of sealed brood that I snitched from the big hive. Sealed brood is the best way to supply bees for a new colony, because the freshly hatched bees have not established any loyalty to a particular queen. Older bees will tend to fly back to their old hive location. Sometimes they will even tear down a queen cell before they realize that the new hive is queenless.

All the stuff to set up the mating nucs is ready to go. The hive in the center is going to host the two new queens while they hatch out and go on their mating flights. The black box has a queen excluder on the bottom, two holes drilled in the sides, and a plywood divider to make two apartments, one for each queen cell. The queens will fight to the death if they can find each other, so they need to be separated. The bees will remove the paper over the next few days, but the queens will be hatched out by then.

A piece of paper goes over the host colony to reduce the amount of queen pheromone that drifts up to the apartments above. Each new colony needs to know that it is queenless and that caring for the newly hatched queen is their only chance to survive. In the wild, a queenless colony with no young brood will just dwindle and die. My bees are not in any great danger if they lose their queen, but they don't need to know that.

The two upstairs apartments are called mating nucs. Nuc is short for nucleus colony. You can't see it in the picture, but each side has a 3/4" hole in it so that the bees can come and go freely.

The queen cells can just be unplugged from the frame and pressed into the comb. Bees keep the hive about 95F inside, so the wax is quite sticky, which makes it easy to attach the cell.

The inner cover has a hole in it so that the bees can get up to the feeder jar.

An empty box goes over the whole thing to keep the feeder out of the sun. These two queens should hatch at the end of the week. In two weeks they should be laying eggs and starting their own colonies.

Follow me so that you can find out if the queens meet true love in the sky over central Virginia.