Queen Rearing Workshop

Our Queen Rearing Project at the Apiary has gone from strength to strength in recent years.  Many new and indeed experienced bee keepers have benefited from being able to buy nucleus colonies with a known provenance from experienced bee keepers who have selected and deliberately bred Queens from gentle but industrious stocks.

"How do they do it?", we all wanted to know...
"We'll create a workshop to show you", they said....and promptly  joined forces with our wood working guru to not only tell us about the Morris board method of Queen rearing, but also show us how to make one for ourselves...

It was too good an opportunity to miss.....we even sold some tickets to other bee keepers from across Surrey and London...

The secret is all in the modified brood box and Morris board....

 

 The picture below shows the bees 'crowding' the two chambers after access to the queen below was 'shut off'.  Its all about convincing the bees the queen has gone and in their over crowded modified chamber they start to create a new queen...

Its not something you can see much of from a distance...

What a good job there was plenty of space for everyone to get in close and see the inner workings of the modified box...

And we can go in close for a frame by frame explanation....

 

Look ...Happy bees....

Everyone agreed it was an absolutely fascinating day and many bee keepers returned home determined to raise their own pedigree queens next year.