Lazy man queen rearing

[Jon]

This is my lazy man's method of queen rearing.
it works if you just need a few extra queens rather than some kind of an industrial production line.

Method One
Wait until a favoured colony starts to make swarm preparations.
Before any queen cells are sealed, do an artificial swarm leaving the old queen with the flyers on the original site in a new brood box.

Set the brood and nurse bees aside marking any good queen cells you want to keep with a drawing pin.
Wait until the queen cells are 2 days from hatching.
In an ideal world, there will be cells over several frames.
To make up a nuc, lift out a frame with a nice cell into the empty nuc. Add 2 frames of stores and a frame of pollen if there is one, and shake in some extra bees.
Bring the nuc to your mating site.
I only have one site so I just set it to the side.
You can check if the cell has hatched 2 days later but other than that leave alone for at least two weeks bofore checking if the queen is laying.

Method Two
This is when all the queen cells are on the same frame.
Two days from hatching, I cut out the queen cells and place each one in a sealed roller cage.
These are slightly tapered so the cell can be wedged gently inside.
You need to brush off most of the bees or they will get in the way of your scalpel.
QCs hanging down at the bottom are easily removed without damaging them. Those in the middle of the frame are trickier to cut out.

Place the roller cages between two frames like this.

Attachment 77

You need to separate the queens like this as the first one out will kill the others or leave with a small cast swarm if there are enough flyers.
The queens should hatch 2 days later and you can split up the colony to make nucs with them. There is no problem with queen acceptance as the queens are with their own bees.

Neither of these methods involves any skills like grafting.

Method three involves removing the larvae from any queen cell and replacing it with a grub from a better colony.
You can then proceed as in method one or two above.
I haven't tried this yet myself.

None of this is rocket science but it works for me. I got about 20 queens mated last year.