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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