Another way of raising a few queens ?

[Jon]

I pretty much agree with what you are saying madasafish but grafting is as easy a method as any if you have reasonable hand eye coordination.
It is not expensive either as the individual cups cost about 30p each and the inserts 4p each. The cups are reusable.
The literature does try and make things seem far more complicated than they need to be.
The obvious advantage of grafting is the volume of queens you can produce for little effort and another is that grafts are resilient and dead easy to transport so you can go somewhere where there is good genetics in a colony, take a few grafts, then take them home to introduce to your cellraiser.
Bee improvement only really works at a group or association level as other than that it is every man for himself with the usual mish-mash of different sub species hybrisiding between each other.

[madasafish]

My close up eyesight is poor and my eyes grow tired very easily. So I can't focus close up enough to graft.. I can see eggs and larvae .. but detailed close up work? Nope.

And my hand shakes.. it's either gin or dementia (I am old enough:-(

[Jon]

If you work at a group or association level one guy (or gal) can graft for about 50. I do all the grafting in our group along with one other group member who has got the hang of it.

[Black Comb]

One thing about queen rearing talks is that the speaker inevitably goes on and on about selection criteria. Often takes up half the talk. If you only have a few hives (or even quite a lot) you know which is your "best" queen. The nuts and bolts of the operation are the bit that matter to beeks new to QR.

[busybeephilip]

Black Comb, yes I have seen this as well,

The best thing is to do what many of the clubs are doing in Northern/Southern Ireland and that is to start a queen rearing group using the best local material that you have access to. It just takes one person to have the enthusiasm and club support to get it going.

[Jon]

To select you really need a lot of colonies and as you say Black Comb, most beekeepers don't have the numbers.
I don't really have the numbers myself which I why I bring in the odd Galtee origin queen to graft from and I concentrate on getting the drone production maximised with Amm drones.
There is a difference between queen rearing and bee breeding which some people don't grasp.
Like you say, the first step should be getting to grips with the steps involved in producing queens and the bee breeding aspect is a much more long term aspiration.
Madasafish is right when he says that some people try and make a dark art out of the entire queen rearing process.

[Castor]

some people try and make a dark art out of the entire queen rearing process.

The truth is that it's not easy to explain, so writers tend to be proscriptive or verrrry complicated. Bee people ain't necessarily the best at explaining a process with so many variables!

My other half will drift off after a few minutes of spoken or written explanation - but give her "hands on" and she's away. Sadly she can't see any better than I can, so neither of us can graft!

[Bridget]

Very interesting thread - I have managed to get a couple of supercedure queens into apideas this year, more by good luck than anything. One survives and is now in a nuc. This method would be fine for me who just wants the security of a couple of extra queens and also a means to add a hive or two. I've printed it off so hopefully I will be able to find it again next spring!