Subject: queen raising in a backyard lot

From: [email-masked] (Phillip R. Gramly)
Date: 19 Feb 1995 06:21:27 GMT

I have been amoung the bees for 3 years now in central Illinois,
the land of many of the bee inovating greats. for as short a time
as i've been in this, i've had a broad range of experience.
i've had trouble getting my bees thru the winter. last winter i had
three hives going in and only came out with one. so i ordered a 
2 lb. package and did a simple split with my one and only hive. 
i thought it was going to be a rebuilding year so i was surprised  
when they produced 100 lb.s of surplus and were very heavy going into
the winter months. (warm day today and i was delighted to see the      
little ladies coming out of both hives to stretch their wings.)

Now to my question: i would like to make increase this year and 
wind up with 3-4 more hives. my first thought was to simply buy as 
many queens as new hives i wanted and split them all up. but then 
i read about raising queens on a small scale by removing the queen 
from a hive and letting the bees raise the queens for me. this 
line of thinking raised a number of questions in my mind:

+ since they will use 1-3 day old eggs to feed royal jelly, how can
  i be sure they will have the right age eggs to select for queens?

+ aren't i just begging for a laying worker to try and take over as 
  queen?

+ how good a quality queens will these be, will they be prone to 
  quick supersedure?

+ more than likely they will build the queen cells on the face of
  the combs. won't the bees cross brace these cells so that i can't 
  remove the queens without destroying the cells and thus the queens?

+ how big a window will i have from when most of the queen cells are 
  capped and when the first queen will emerge and proceed to destroy 
  all the other qu cells if i haven't removed them? (i'm concerned 
  about bad whether when i'm ready to make my splits.)

- has anyone tried something like this? can you give me some pointers?

- can anyone recomend a book on queen rearing that addresses the 
  backyard beekeeper?

fascinated with the bees,

Phillip
 
-- 
[email-masked]|| Miss Mills replied, on general principles,  
Phillip Gramly         || that the Cottage of content was better than
in the cottage of      || the Palace of cold splendour, and that where
content in Sadorus, IL || love was, all was.     -David Copperfield

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From: [email-masked] (Aaron Morris)
Date: Tue, 21 Feb 95 10:31:28 EST

In article <[email-masked]>
[email-masked] (Phillip R. Gramly) writes:
 
>...
>Now to my question:...
>
>too many questions to type answers...
>
I would recommend the discussion of requeening found in Killion's "Honey
in the Comb", available from Dadant and Sons.  A very informative
discussion of rearing queens, including the "how tos" and timing
schedules to produce as many queens as you may need, when you need them.
Book runs around $10 U.S. (about the price of a single queen) and is
well worth the investment.
 
Aaron Morris - I think, therefore I bee!