Twenty-four beekeepers attended my queen rearing class at
Bemis Honey Bee Farm as part of our continuing beekeeping educational program.
The beekeepers expanded their understanding of honey bee biology and bee colony
reproduction. They learned the conditions under which bee colonies produce
queens, including preparation for swarming. Before a bee colony divides itself
and swarms, it produces a new queen to continue reproducing bees in the
original hive. The hive conditions that lead to swarming are the same as beekeepers
create to encourage bees to produce queens. The beekeepers learned the
importance of record keeping and colony evaluation in producing high quality
queens. By carefully observing a bee hive’s characteristics, beekeepers evaluate
the queen’s traits. They then select hives with desirable traits to become
“drone mother hives” which produce high-quality drones to mate with virgin
queens. Hives that the beekeeper determines to be the best-of-the-best are designated
as “queen mother hives” producing larvae to develop into high-quality queen
bees. The beekeepers learned that to produce these high-quality queens three
conditions are necessary: First, we must select from parent queens with good
genetic traits; next, the queens must have good nutrition throughout their
development; and finally, the virgin queen must successfully mate with a large
number of high-quality drones. The beekeepers learned the actions to take to
develop a queen-rearing program for continuous stock improvement.
The beekeepers followed the procedures involved in producing
queen bees using the Doolittle Method of Queen Production, the method most widely
used for producing queens throughout the beekeeping industry. G. M. Doolittle developed
the techniques over one hundred years ago. Two beekeeper students employ the
Doolittle Method in today’s photo. They are grafting tiny day-old larvae into
queen cell cups that they will place into hives filled with workers selected
for their ability to produce queens. The beekeepers move the grafted cells from
a “cell starter hive” and then to a “cell finisher hive” and finally to a “queen
mating nucleus hive.”
--Richard
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