Every honey bee hive has a queen, and only bees can produce honey
bee queens. Queen production peaks in the spring when there are drone bees
available to mate with the queens. Timing is critical in queen rearing. I
assisted a group of Arkansas beekeepers who performed the steps required to
produce a number of queens. Strong and healthy honey bee colonies reproduce on
a colony-wide basis by swarming. Swarming is the culmination of a month-long
process in which the colony divides and half of the bees fly away to find a new
nest. One of the final steps in swarming involves the colony producing one or
more queen bees. This natural process of producing queens was replicated by G.
M. Doolittle more than one hundred years ago, and the Doolittle Method is used
today to produce queens world-wide. This method requires beekeepers to establish
a number of different hives for queen production with each hive set-up to
accommodate a different step in the queens’ development. Typically, beekeepers establish
queen-mother hives, queen-cell-starter hives, queen-cell-finisher hives, and
queen-mating-nucleus hives with bees of the appropriate age and necessary food.
This hive preparation is often a shared endeavor among cooperating beekeepers. Our
early-April queen production effort involved six seasoned beekeepers.
On grafting day, we searched the queen-mother hives for
one-day-old larvae to graft into queen cell cups. Worker bees tend to these
young larvae and convert them into queen bees. We found that our first queen-mother
hive had progressed in its natural manner toward swarming. The queen had stopped
laying eggs, and day-old larvae were not available. We found four queen cells
produced for swarming, like the one in today’s photo by Desmond Simmons. One queen
was actually in the process of emerging as an adult. We used these queen cells
to produce four additional colonies. Grafting continued successfully with
larvae taken from other hives. At the end of the day we started the development
of queens for two hundred new hives.
--Richard