HOW TO MAKE QUEENS, NUCS, and NEW COLONIES!! Make More Bees! 

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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.

@@brownsbeefarm 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.

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.

Merhaba Ben türkiyede aricilik yapiyorum.Kraliçe ari yetistirmekte bazi sorunlar yaşiyorum sizinle nasil iletişim kurabilirim?

Good video!! Thank you. Sorry about your eye.

Great info for people breeding queens. Just want to add one more important thing about the grafting. Always keep the lava the same way up otherwise it’ll drown. This was drilled into me many years ago by my mentor

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.. ?

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no, that is rubbish advice for snake bites. Dangerously stupid.

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.

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

Yes.

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.

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. 👍

I have a HovaBator Genesis 🙂 Thanks for watching!

Great post, The good, the bad, the ugly! Sowing it like it is👍😊

It is indeed! Best suit I’ve purchased, won’t ever buy another type.

@@brownsbeefarm Really? Good to hear. We are about to order some.

All purchased from MannLake LTD!

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

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.

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

@@brownsbeefarm 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

@@jacobnelson9144 because the small hive is focused on getting new ones going, so they have a lot of energy to start cells, so they make a lot of them. Now if you left them to keep feeding, they’d quickly run out of energy and ability to finish the cells. So you take advantage of their energy on making royal jelly, since it’s loaded with young brood, and the finisher hive has the ability to finish off the amount of cells the starter makes.

Wild mutts are the best 😍

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

@@brownsbeefarm 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 😄

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.

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.

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!

@@ratamahatta1300 because the starter is being reused as a starter. If you use the starter as the finisher, then you can’t make any more queens from that starter until they’re hatched. The starter getting them started and fed, then you pull them and can immediately stick some more in. Then the finisher takes care of capping them off, then off to the incubator they go. Also, using a starter/finisher for both means you can’t make as many queens. A strong queenless starter can make LOTS of queens.

@@brownsbeefarm does the finisher have to be queenless?

@@ratamahatta1300 no the finisher is queen-right

@@brownsbeefarm thanks

Haha yes, sometimes that has taken me by surprise when suddenly bees are hanging out with my head 😂

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 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

@@brownsbeefarm ok, I'll email you.

@@DeanGoedel we have them in the bigger farm areas, I am in a neighborhood of 3-5 acre lots and so they usually aren’t here by me. But they’re a problem for anyone who has them!

I am in central Texas

No not really lol

@@brownsbeefarm 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.

I had zero success doing it that way.

Aww thank you. I’ll let them know you said that 🥰🐝

Thanks Mark :)