Video brought to you by Wendell Estate Honey: Our 100% pure, natural, raw, Canadian prairie blossom honey is available at wendellestate....
The queen bee is the most important individual in any honeybee colony. A colony simply cannot survive without a healthy queen bee. The productivity, or fertility of a queen bee determine the health and success of the beehive and is a very important factor in honey production. Every beekeeper would like to have a healthy queen bee in each beehive. Accidents happen, queens get old and die: Sometimes beehives need a replacement queen to survive. In this video we will show how we raise our own queen bees at Wendell Honey farm.
Raising our own queen bees not only gives us a supply of young, healthy queens to use to replace failing or deceased queens, but also allows us to select for certain desirable genetic traits as we raise the new queens. We select our breeder queens (the queen bees that lay the eggs that we will raise queens from) based on their colony’s history of honey production, disease resistance, gentleness and proven ability to survive the Canadian prairie’s harsh winters.
It's in their nature to reign supreme: queen bees usually won’t tolerate the presence of another queen bee: Two queen bees in the same hive tend to fight to the death. It’s important that each new hatchling queen bee has her own safe home to hatch into. We use a nucleus colony (or “nuc” for short). A nuc is basically a mini-beehive with wax honeycombs inside containing pollen and honey stores, as well as empty cells for the young queen to lay eggs in. We collect some bees (a queen needs her subjects), preferably younger nurse bees whose natural position in the hive is to support the queen and raise more young bees and add them to each nuc, making the nuc ready to receive its new queen.
A queen bee starts out as a fertilized female egg. An egg hatches into a bee larva after 3 days. After a female larva is fed “bee bread” (a mixture of pollen, honey, and bee enzymes), the course of its development shifts from becoming a fertile queen bee to growing into a sterile worker bee. The vast majority of female eggs grow up as worker bees rather than queens. Larvae less than 3 days old (since they hatched from the egg) have been fed exclusively royal jelly and still have the potential to grow into a worker or queen bee. In order to raise queen bees in a controlled manner, the queen team selects female larvae that has been hatched out for less than 3 days (the younger the better) and very gently transfers this tiny larva into a plastic “queen cup”. The first step of raising queens is carefully transferring a batch of viable young female larvae into queen cups (10:23 in the video).
The queen cups with young female larva are then placed on a wooden honey frame and inserted (7:10) into a beehive that has been intentionally made queenless (2:26). At Wendell Honey this “hive” is one box of the hive in which a barrier has been placed isolating the bees in that box from their queen and her pheromones. When worker bees don’t sense the queen’s pheromones, they believe that their colony has lost its queen and start working as quickly as possible to raise a new queen. Remember, a hive without a queen cannot survive. Conveniently for the queen “queenless” bees, there is a bunch of young worker larvae (in queen cups) that the queen team has placed inside their box (the queen team has also removed all the other young larvae from that box. The queenless worker bees get busy feeding royal jelly to the larvae.
Before the queen larva pupates on day 8, the queen larva is capped with wax. The cup with the peanut-looking wax capping is called a queen cell. The queen pupae develop inside queen cells until they hatch out as (unmated) queen bees on day 16. Before the queens hatch out, they are removed from the hive and each cell is placed into its own nuc to hatch, finish developing and get mated (14:41).
This video was made for Wendell Estate Honey by our talented videographer beekeeper, Brent Ross. Our award-winning gourmet honey is harvested from our own beehives and packaged fresh on our farm. You can see it here wendellestate..... Nothing is added. Nothing is removed. Unheated. Unfiltered. Unparalleled silky-smooth texture. Fresh floral aromas. Unique, delicate flavors.
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16 сен 2024
