Parque Natural Mexiquillo

7.16.2018

Making Queens

I am visiting my brother and his lovey wife Ann. I accompanied Don yesterday when he helped a fellow bee keeper, Mike, promote queen bee production.


Step one - Find the queen and remove her from the hive


Looking, Looking ........


There she is. The one with the short wings


Step two - add many many bees to the hive. Mike is over crowding the hive to create a situation where the bees may swarm. When this happens the bees first reaction is to create new queens by feeding the larvae royal jelly that they secrete from a gland.

They take bee covered frames out of other hives and knock them off into this hive.


Over crowding


Step three - find larvae that are less than 24 hours old and put one in each plastic cup shown below.


The larvae are white


Don and Mike setting up.


Mike uses a minuscule scoop to extract the larvae


Success. 


Larvae ready to be returned to the hive


In all, Mike returned 80 larvae to the over crowed hive. He figures  80% of the larvae will become queens.


Mike will create Nuc Hives with the new queens and sell them to people that want to start a new hive.

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