HOW TO MAKE QUEENS, NUCS, and NEW COLONIES!! Make More Bees!
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- čas přidán 4. 09. 2022
- I apologize for my absence!
I’ve been pretty busy, and also this video really held me back.
It was a lot of info and I filmed a lot of clips throughout learning this process, so breaking it all down and creating one edit that makes sense wasn’t easy, but here it is.
I don’t go into too much of the “How To” on the queen rearing, but I made it happen and hopefully next year I can explain it in more depth.
This video shows how I graft queens, what I do once they hatch, how I add them to a newly made split, the mating process, and finally how to expand your nucs into a larger box.
I hope you all enjoy!
Hey this is great stuff. I have been keeping bees for 10 years. Next year is the year I plan to get serious about making my own queens. Thanks for taking the time and making the effort to make this video.
Back when I was beekeeping, we used to take a small paint brush and brush the larva into our homemade cones. Work everytime. Good luck with raising queens.
That's some serious propolis on the bee tree entrance.
Tip :
DONT Shake donor Frames of Bees !You could dislodge those young Larva. Just saying. 👀
Better to brush off the Bees gently, ideally with a Rooster or Chicken Wing (!)
Bees dont get stuck in Bird Feather (aka a Fan Brush.)
Maybe ask about at Community Animal Farms : they might have an Elder Bird who dies of old age.
Or maybe someone who has the Roo for the Stock Pot. Either way : Fan the feathers out smoothly and dry these wings in a dry warm place for several weeks. Until they have no moisture in them to spoil !
Lots of Beeks keep yard birds, so why not do Bee Brushing in a nicer manner.
🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝
Happy Beekeeping 2023
🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝
New Flow Hive beekeeper here. What a cool video and didn’t know you could do this. You’re like a mad scientist!! 😂
Chew up plantain and smear it on the sting. Repeat until swelling goes away. Has also been used successfully on snake bites.
I'm happy you're back. The grafting works really good I see, that's a craft on its own.
I would personally suggest putting honey on your bee stings. It helps with the burning, itching and swelling. I got popped 4 times in the face and had zero issues after the first 10 minutes, but I also put honey on it right away. It just ended up being a small little bump that kind of felt like a small zit. However, I did get stung on the knee recently and figured it wouldn't be a big deal and left it be without putting honey on it. Boy was that a mistake! My knee swelled up, it was hot to the touch, itchy, and a little tight and sore. I didnt think it would be so bad since it was on my leg and nobody would really see it. Honey, honey, honey for ALL BEE STINGS! Cool video! Thanks for sharing.
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Great video... Thanks for showing the dangers of letting your guard down. Hope it doesn't last long. Ver fascinating.👍🏾
Raising quality queen bees , david burns, free pdf. Really good documents. Tx for sharing your jeep setup, got to find a way to make it work 👍 good job. David said that 24-36hrs in the starter hive is enough. Better without any open eggs or larva, just your queen graft and cap brood. And start I found somewhere, you should feed your finish hive 3day in advance and during the process , to stimulate bees.
I dont mean to be rude by commenting, I just wanna give you advices on where i think you can improve.
First of all- I couldnt see the starter hive but for you to have a better cluster of bees on those cells you need to reduce the starter if its not totally full, so for that reason you need a 7 frame hive and trust me they'll fill those cups with royal gel to the top.
second- when you had those virgins hatch and put on cages, I noticed you took nurse bees from a hive which It should be queenless for better success and also the youngest nurse bees are found on open larvae so make sure next time you take those nurse bees on frames of open young larvae.
Third- never keep your cells and queens out in the sun and also make sure to give them water time to time, or you can puta sponge near them so they can suck water out.
However, nice work.
Thank you my friend!
All good info!
It was my first year doing queens after a lot of research and I think I did pretty good, but I agree with all that you said. Always room for improving!
Thank you for your support.
@@brownsbeefarm8852 you are wellcome my friend, I also did my first graft last year and it was very nice to see that everything worked pretty well for me, but I didnt have a finisher hive since I dont understand it that well, but the starter eas used as a finisher and everythig went on point. I ll be happy to see more of your videos.
Great.
Mr. Brown Bravo, keep it up so interesting. Good work I like it.
He gives a hole new meaning to bee smoker!
Hello. I have a suggestion. 2. Transferred larvae Wouldn't it be better to feed the day if you put it in the brood where the queen bee is? I think larger and better quality queens will be formed. Regards
I really enjoyed your video bud.
I hope you continue to video your bee adventures, your really easy to learn from.
Thank you and keep up your great work
Matt from Battletown Ky
Thank you SO much for the kind words of support Matt. Means a lot. Hoping to try doing something exciting this spring or catch some swarming on cam again.
Thanks again for watching
😊
@brownsbeefarm8852 what happens if there are two or three Queens in a single hive.. ?
Plant regular and sweet sorghum. Really a great crop for the bees and they are drought tolerant.
Save up your wax, use it to seal your hives instead of paint, it'll last well over 20 years
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Grafting is something I need to get a handle on. I wonder how some of my genetics would do down there. They are definitely calm and totally untreated survivors.
The hive I grafted those queens from was from a Cory Stevens VSH queen, which mated with my local drones. So those grafts are a VSH Italian hybrid mutt, and they’re very calm and are doing great. I like them better than the Cory Stevens queen hive because those are too boring. But using those genetics to breed with my local spicy genetics seems to have given me something good.
It’s the setup of the starter colony that was the biggest set back of grafting.
The grafting is easy, and setting up the finisher hive is easy. But man, that starter hive will screw up a lot of work if you don’t do it right.
How do you know whether the attendant bees will try to kill the new queen? Also, if putting in a weak queened nuc box, how long does queen cage have to set on top before she is released into hive and will old queen kill her, that is if can't find her?
Plus, what if have a laying worker that bees tried making queen cells from Drone brood, can you still add a new queen in cage and bees accept her, or will they kill her? I'm new and need help.
Hello I just found your video. Just a few things I noticed. (1) do not shake you bees off the frame you are grafting from lightly brush . (2) always make sure you have a lot of fresh baby bees in your starter hive well in both an finisher hive , an food , pollen, an feed them sugar syrup, maybe pollen Pattie’s. I could not really see just how full you had your hives with bee but they need to be FULL FULL FULL of baby bees an the more grafting cells you have in at one time the more bees you need that’s why you need on each time you are going to do a graft you need at least one frame of capped or more brood so they will hatch while the cells are in there to be able to feed your cell . In both starter an finisher do not have open eggs or larvae at all that that makes the bees work in your cells . Also you will have better take if the cell hatch out in your nucleus hives . Last are queens mated when you sale them ???? . If not this is not good practice you an the purchasers need to know that each queen is laying a great nest before hand . You need to let a queen lay a few cycles of bees an also do not mark a queen before she is mated . This was a lot but I hope it will help you out if you have any questions fill free to ask . You are doing good you just need to change a few things. Good luck.
Thank you for taking the time to clear up those points. It's hard to know who to trust now raising bees is a huge industry all to itself.
good job 👍🏼
They must call you the Bee 🐝 Whisperhahahahaha 😅
I am happy for your great work. Your work is helpful, and I am planning to start bee keeping next year
great video
Thanks Mark :)
Good video
Ho good work 😊
Where did you get those tweezers you used to pick up the nurse bees. I have been using my fingers and sometimes grab an “ouch” bee.
Search giant tweezers on Amazon lol. Amazon has everything!
They are very help them. I used them when I was doing some apitherapy stuff. It makes grabbing them much easier.
That was amazing! 👏
So what's the main purpose for making your own queens? Is it another way to make profit or is there more use to it?
Subed!
I'm planning to take a few courses and get into bees by the spring.
Thanks! Main purpose was to expand my own yard by using those virgin queens for splits. Do any and all research you can before jumping into bees! Consider finding someone local to go on removals and swarm calls with. It gets you tons of knowledge and speeds up your learning process much quicker than learning from your own mistakes in your own yard. That takes time. Hands on experience is the best teacher.
Being in cage how long queen can serve
@@kakakhankhan8529 about 3 days
❤ok
Hey, great video. Quick question, is that a ultra breeze suit?
It is indeed! Best suit I’ve purchased, won’t ever buy another type.
@@brownsbeefarm8852 Really? Good to hear. We are about to order some.
Sorry for the newbie question, but what is the difference in a starter and a finisher hive?
Also is that a double screen board on the finisher hive?
Hi.
A Starter Hive : is a Hive that has no Queen at all. What Beekeepers call Hopelessly Queenless !
You need this as : Bees think where's Momma? We need a Momma ! So 'find' an Egg OR the Beek gives them "Eggs" in preset Cell Building Cups etc.
They will Feed and Nuture that Egg, feeding say x16000 a day !
Next.
Once the Beekeeper goes into the Starter Hive : he will see, or ascertain how many Cells have been 'started.*' [to be drawn down into long hanging "Peanut" structures. These are Queen Cells ! Aka lots of unborn young Virgin Queen Mommas.]
A Finisher Hive : Does the job of 'finishing' the drawing down of these Cells. A Regular Hive can be a Finisher (with a Queen !) But she needs to be down in the Brood Box, have a Super. Then a Hive Mesh Screen Board is added, then an Eck (a Spacer Rim) then another Mesh Board, and finally a Top Box with its own upper entrance. No existing Queen must touch / or sting dead her opponent, hence that gap or 'distance' between those boards.
The upper Box will be full of lots of 'nuturing' Nurse Bees. These are freshly born Bees that have not left the Hive or flown before. (Mainly identified by them looking really cute and Fuzzy !) Beeks need to collect up these Nurse Bees. (If they are isolated by that Mesh. Otherwise they know babies are 'there' and will go up to find and nuture them, via those QE Bars. Bees can fit through these no problem at all. . .
Worker Bees (worn off their fuzz ! : Do all the Work : Feed the Queen, build Comb, go out to get Nectar, make Honey etc. They Work !!! And Run about a lot and Fly ! Hence not Nurse Bees, anymore !
The Finisher Hive basically raises those Queen Cells until 'one' hatches. The Beekeeper must make sure the 1st one to hatch doesn't go and kill all her fellow Queen Sisters (to Death) as the Primary one Rules, and doesn't allow others to take her Crown (!) So in this case. All Queen Cells are added to Cages, with a few Attendants encased and unable to get to each other, eg (do the others in !)
Then x1 young unmated Queen is added to a small (Hopelessly Queenless) Box of Bees : a Mating Nuc, to start a New Colony of Bees with their own Queen !
Get the idea. 😎
🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝
Happy Beekeeping 2023
🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝
Some add Queen Excluders x2 also with a Gap, instead of Mesh Floors. BUT unless you know all Queens up top are Caged and secure. A Virgin on the 'run' is very slim still, and could 'Wiggle' through those QE Bars and go down stairs and Kill the big boss Queen ! YIikes.
Mesh Boards mean Bees up top need their own Food Source and access. If using QEs : Bees can crawl up and down and do Feeding and / or Hive activities. With the Queen being to Fat to get up through those QE Bars ! Yet her "Phremones" are wafted all about the Hive : to tell her Subjects 'I am your Queen'
I Rule, and becasuse you can 'smell' me, you dont need to make a replacement 'me' !
However Colony Democracy is done by the Bees : to the Queen. If shes old, ill, not doing well. They can kill her, and make 'new' Queens to replace her. They find their own Egg and start off the process as above : Naturally !Lots of Queens means to many Rulers in one Box, so its a Queen to Queen :Death fight, OR (usually) the older one 'is kicked out' aka leaves. 🙄
That's called Bees Swarming !
Nature's way of reproducing more Bee Colonies. 👍
Great job..
What kind of incubator you have?
I have a HovaBator Genesis 🙂
Thanks for watching!
Great post, The good, the bad, the ugly! Sowing it like it is👍😊
Just subscribed.
Hello, can someone explain to me why starters and finishers are used. Why not leave the queens in the starter. What is his role afterwards, because the beehive is still without a queen.
By using a starter and finisher, you are able to mimic a queenless situation in a way that causes the new grafts to get fed as well as possible.
So for the starter, the reason you can do 45 queens at once is because I had about three colonies worth of queenless bees packed into a single 10 frame deep. So they’re so unbelievably stuffed in there and they’re so desperate for a queen that when you stick 45 grafts in, they will get them all fed ultimately.
Then, you let them stay for 48 hours so the cups get packed with royal jelly.
Now, you can take them from your started and go to the finisher hive. The starter is only good at packing in royal jelly into the cups since it’s mostly nurse bees, but they wouldn’t be good at fully finishing the cells, like a finisher hive would be.
A finisher hive is set up as an active 2 or 3 deep colony, then you put a queen excluder on top, and then add another box over that which would include lots of pollen and nectar, and fresh hatching nurse bees, along with your 48 hour old grafts.
So what happens is the bees from the colony below come up into the top box through the excluder because they can tell there is open brood up there.
When they get up there, they realize oh what the heck, apparently we are making queens. So they start finishing off the queens. The fresh hatching nurse bees right next to the grafts along with lots of pollen nearby insures that they grafts will be fed well and closed up healthily.
Then, after 5 more days I can get them out and put them into my incubator because they’ll be fully capped off at that point.
So basically the starters and finishers is how you make LOTS of queens.
You could make a small handful in a queenless hive, but they might not be quite as healthy if you force them to make too many. It’s a weird balance of tons of bees vs how many queens you actually get lol
@@brownsbeefarm8852 Thanks for the detailed answer. My assumption was that the starter colony could also finish the queen cells. What do you do with the bees in the starter after they are done with the queens?
@@toolsofthefuture make more queens! You can run another batch or two on a starter before replenishing it with more nurse bees, or you can split the starter hive up into a few nucs and add one of your new queens to each one. And now you’ve got a few new colonies
Where are you located? South Texas? Thanks for your help and I do have a question: The starter hive is Queen less for how many days/hours? Also the finisher is a Queen less to?
I am a bit north of San Antonio!
On the starter hive, it has to be queenless for long enough to know there is zero chance of them making any cells. So if you make them queenless, they’re usually very good at coming up with a queen due to an egg you may not have seen or something. So once you’ve confirmed there is no longer ANY chance a queen can be made, you can insert your grafts.
The finisher I used is a queen-right finisher. The queen is separated by an excluder and excluded to the lower boxes. It’s called the Ben Harden method
@@brownsbeefarm8852 I appreciate your fast response. I will definitely look into grafting and I want to make sure I don’t lose any of the steps.
@@steliandone4078 I am happy to help. Queen grafting was fun and I am glad I can do it, but I won’t be doing it this year.
Be ready to need a lot of extra bees, and be ready for it to not work the first few times potentially until you get everything down. It’s very rewarding but it does take exact requirements on each step in order to work 😄
This is excellent. I have been studying on making queens and your demonstration is the easiest for me to understand. Where do you get your queen making supplies ?
All purchased from MannLake LTD!
👍👍👍
you need more bees in the starter hive
So with bee grafting are they going to be made into a Queen Bee 🐝. I don't know anything about the care of bees.
Yes.
I need some of your Mutt bees! lol
Wild mutts are the best 😍
What's the difference between a starter hive and finisher hive? Are they queenless hives or not?
A starter hive will be a heavily packed ‘hopelessly queenless’ box full of bees. What that means is there is 0% chance that any sort of queen is either in the box or egg/larva viable for making a queen.
This way you put you grafts in and get heavily fed queen cups, since they so badly need a queen.
The finisher hive is a queen-right hive that has the queen excluded to the bottom to boxes. In the third box, the bees have been narrowed down to that small area of frames and the freshly fed starter cups are supplied to that box. The bees think they need to make queens, and as long as the actual queen doesn’t touch those cup, the bees will finish making queens in them.
Once the queen cells are closed, I take them to the incubator ☺️
@brownsbeefarm8852 OK, thanks so much! So, In the starter hive you only leave a few days, but not allow them to cap them? How long? Also, is there a reason they shouldn't? So, then in finisher hive, you have to remove after capped but not allow them to hatch, or I'm guessing they will kill her since already have gueen below excluder.
@@JulysAngel69 correct, 48 hours in the starter. It allows the larva to start being fed intense amounts of royal jelly. Then the finisher will cap them off. Then 5 more days in the finisher to give you 7 total days, then they need to come out and go into the incubator so they hatch in there and not the finisher hive.
hey, why do you have a "starter" and a "finisher". why can't the starter do all the work? whats the differences between this two? Thanks
The starter allows the cells to get fed better initially, but they can’t handle finishing them off. The finishers is strong enough to finish feeding and capping the cells.
I failed horribly on my first attempt at grafting. I only got three out of 12. I am working on a better way to harvest age-appropriate larva. You are doing better than you think. Did I understand that you are in Texas?
That’s pretty good! I was getting about 10 out of 30 when I first started. You might look into a Nicot system. And yes sir I am in Texas, north of San Antonio about 40 minutes
Why do you need to switch hives?
You mean out of a nuc and into a 10 frame box? If so, I usually wait for the nuc to fill at LEAST four of the five frames with bees and or honey, and are really packed before moving them. I’ve made the mistake of moving three frames of bees into a 10 frame and it usually doesn’t go great.
1 thing to point out. Zip up all your zippers, don't want to get stung if you don't need to be.
Haha yes, sometimes that has taken me by surprise when suddenly bees are hanging out with my head 😂
super video. i cant believe u drink out of a can....around here bees get in ur can and stick u inside ur mouth throat....u got nerves to drink from a can lol.
Where are you located? Do you have problems with HB??Veroa
I am in central texas. Watch a few more of my videos, as my channel is specifically focused around not treating for anything including beetles or mites. I don’t treat at all, and I don’t have trouble.
I'm in your area, do you sell queen bees? I actually could use one right now.
I don’t, this time of year, but the plan is to regularly starting next spring. If you need something, I could help you out most likely. Could sell you an established hive or nuc right now most likely, or you’re welcome to wait until later in spring.
Send me an email if you’d like.
Brownsbeefarmtx@gmail.com
@@brownsbeefarm8852 ok, I'll email you.
Why don't beekeepers sell the propolis. It has amazing medicinal properties
What state do u live?
I am in central Texas
Seems like you would have better success if your cell builder had about 2-3 times the nurse bees it has right now.
Agreed! I had some failures leading up to the batch filmed in this video, and honestly at one point they were getting fed much better than that batch had gotten fed. Will definitely have a more packed starter next time!
is beekeeping profitable i'm interested
No not really lol
@@brownsbeefarm8852 dammm straight answer XD i'm still intressted tho XD
@@ToxicRabbit420 don’t do it for the money. Do it for the joy of beekeeping.
Great video. If any possibility of me calling you to pick your brain, I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you….
"Africanized" ?
You know you get a lot better takes if you let the cell hatch in your nuke instead of putting a Virgin Queen in.
I had zero success doing it that way.
your hives are way too hot!
Aww thank you. I’ll let them know you said that 🥰🐝
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