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Queen Rearing Timetable for Cloake Board & Jenter Kit

Gimlet — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 15:40:29 +0000

It’s easy to get confused when setting up your queen rearing – I know – I’ve been there.

But don’t panic, this simple-to-use timetable/diagram below is for queen rearing using the Cloake board method with a Jenter kit. However, if you prefer to graft or the queen won’t play ball with the Jenter – all is not lost – just graft the smallest larvae you can find on day 8 and all should be well.

Good luck!

By the way, the header photo is of the Lewis chessmen – found on the island of Lewis, Scotland in 1831. They were made from walrus tusks and whale teeth in Norway or perhaps Iceland in the 12th century.

Their queen rearing is not going well. He thinks she’s to blame. She thinks she’s to blame. Meanwhile the bishop wonders if it could be something to do with his grafting tool. It does look a bit on the clonky side.

Click the timetable for a bigger picture.

Queen Rearing Timetable for use with Jenter Kit and Cloake Board

Start on day 0 with setting up the Cloake board system.

Click here for full instructions on how to set up your Cloake board system.

Jenter kit set up starts on Day 2.

Click here for full instructions on how to use your Jenter kit

Click here for Queen Rearing Timeline.

Click here for how to set up an Apidea

The post Queen Rearing Timetable for Cloake Board & Jenter Kit first appeared on Beespoke Info.

Queen Bee Introduction – Postal Cage

Gimlet — Mon, 12 Oct 2015 16:24:42 +0000

Introducing a new queen bee can be ticklish enough – especially if she has spent a few days in the post and has gone off lay as a result. Here’s the best way to introduce a queen that’s been in the post.

Preparation

Dequeen 7 days in advance of the new queen’s arrival;

Or:

If you have colony you think is queenless – you need to be sure. Add in a test frame with young larvae – not just eggs – they will eat alien eggs but will adopt alien larvae and draw queen cells from them if they are queenless. If they do not draw queen cells they are not queenless.

One Week Later

Either way – 7 days later, go carefully through the colony again and knock off all of the queen cells.

Gently shake the bees off so you can be sure you them all – if you miss even one crappy little thing they will not accept the new queen;
Your new queen will be accompanied by an escort of worker bees. Let these girls out of the cage – your queen must go alone into her new home. In the cage that is!
Make sure the candy cavity is plugged with candy.
Remove the protective plastic gate so the bees can chew their way through the candy to get to their queen;
Suspend the cage from a frame near the middle of the brood nest – where the bees would expect to find her. Most postal cages are equipped with a little loop so you can do something imaginative with a matchstick or some local twiggery;

Leave the bees seriously alone for a week – then:

After a week go carefully through the colony.
Look out for the queen – she should have been marked by your supplier. If you can’t find the queen – look for eggs, as long as there are eggs all is well; close it up and leave it alone.
Look for queen cells and don’t panic if there are some. Sometimes the bees mistake a queen newly coming into lay for a queen going out of lay and prepare to supersede. Just knock the cells off and as long as you have seen eggs – walk away;

Occasionally, the bees have not released the queen – perhaps the candy is too hard, the queen is off lay or they don’t understand the principle! Carefully release her – they should have got used to her after a week and usually she just runs down between the frames to the manner born.

Click here for the Basics of Queen Bee Introduction

Click here for the Matchbox Method of Queen Bee Introduction

Click here for the Paper Bag Method of Queen Bee introduction

Click here for How to Introduce a Queen Bee to an Apidea

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Queen Rearing – How to Graft

Gimlet — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 08:28:32 +0000

Grafting is often seen as highly technical and an unattainable skill. It shouldn’t be though – because it isn’t – it’s just practice and knack.

After all, the aim is simple enough: – to transfer a young larva from one cell to another. How difficult can it be?

To maximise success you need to sit down and think for a bit though. Consider how to choose your larvae, which grafting tool to use and how to set up your rearer colony. Then get stuck in – what’s to lose?

The Larvae

Worker larvae and larvae destined to be queens both receive the same food until they are two days old. After that, queen larvae receive the much richer ‘royal jelly’ while the worker larvae are fed bee milk until they pupate.

Therefore, the larvae you use for grafting should be less than two days old – that’s five days in total, 3 as an egg and 2 as larvae.

When the eggs first hatch, the larvae are so tiny and transparent they are difficult to see at all. They are also very scantly supplied with brood food. These larvae are too small for the following two reasons:

They are physically too delicate – you will almost certainly damage them with your grafting tool;
The lack of brood food surrounding these tiniest larvae means they are also very much prone to dehydration.

Most beekeepers are likely to be limited by their eyesight anyway so aim to get them as small as is possible. If however, you are young and your eyes are very good then I would suggest that you choose them a bit bigger than that – be pragmatic and get them as small as is sensible.

Try also to get your larvae all the same age.

Look at a newspaper and find a lower case ‘c’. Depending on your newspaper, this is approaching the biggest larvae you can successfully use.

Choice of Queen

Ideally you will have records of at least a year so that you can properly assess your queen mother. If you don’t have records – be careful or you could be sowing dragons teeth; once the genie is out of the bottle…

Click here for How to Assess your Bees and a downloadable Colony Assessment Sheet.

Additionally, your queen should be laying like mad. If she isn’t you will struggle to find sufficient larvae of the right age on one frame. Choose a frame where there is a good sized patch of larvae with a range of ages from eggs all the way up but where you can see plenty of the smaller ones.

Find a row of larvae of the right age then draw a sharp knife across the cell walls so you can part the comb allowing better access.

Scoop up each larva as if it was a sleepy kitten.

Grafting Tools

There are a number of tools available from stainless steel to humble plastic and available at a predictable range of prices. This is one area when the cheapest is actually the best.

The Chinese grafting tool is made of plastic tipped with a delicate sliver of something fine and flexible with a rounded tip – like a fairy’s fingernail. At the other end is a spring loaded plunger. To use it, you gently slide the edge of the tip under the larva – approaching it from behind – and, with a slight sideways scooping motion, lift it free. If you find the larva tends to stick to the side of the cell, try licking the the sliver tip before each graft.

To unload it you merely touch the tip of the tool to the bottom or your target cup, so it bends slightly and depress the plunger. This causes a plastic nudger to slide down the length of the sliver and push the little larva off the end. How difficult was that?

By the way, if this letter c is your larva – the back is to the left.

If you can’t get on with a Chinese grafting tool – you have only wasted a couple of euro/quid/dollars etc.

Very expensive stainless steel grafting tools like the things dentists prod and scratch at your teeth with are are also available. I found them too rigid and clumsy – you know how it feels to get a dig from one of them things!

However, some people like them and you might be one of them.

But you can use anything that works for you – even a cocktail stick can be pressed into service if you chew the very tip of it to soften it then bend it over at an angle to suit both you and your larvae.

Cell cups

I use plastic cups from a Cup Kit attached to two bars in a bar frame (see header photo). The bars swivel so I can lay the frame flat and also have the cups facing up at me.

The frame should be put into the rearer colony the day before you are due to graft so that it gets to smell a bit beeish.

A standard deep National frame can be fitted with two bars and each bar can hold about 10 cups. Don’t overload your rearer colony; you might get more cells accepted but they will probably be poor quality.

Wet grafting versus Dry grafting

If you use a fine paintbrush – the type Leonardo da Vinci used to paint the eyelashes on Monalisa – you can put a miniscule drop of water (no larger than the larva) into the base of each cup. Then when you come along with your little larva, the surface tension of the water will make it easier for you push it off with the nudger. The size of larvae you are working with are very prone to dehydration so the water will help prevent that from happening. By the way, if you are connected to main drainage it might be better to use rainwater than the chlorinated stuff from the tap.

You can graft dry but I find it much more difficult – perhaps it is something to work towards. If you are working in the field however – dry grafting may be what you are stuck with. It’s just another knack. Keep out of the sun – strong direct sunlight will kill your larvae.

Some people mix up royal jelly with a bit of water and dab a little of this into the cells. The chances are that the more steps and complexity you add into the process, the more places there are to go wrong.

Queen Rearing Colony

Once this is done – you are ready to place them into your rearer colony. There are many ways of setting up a queen rearing colony. One of the best is the Cloake board system which allows you to use a queen right colony. Queen right colonies are more balanced and will raise better cells. Click here for How to Set up and Use the Cloake board system.

Click here for How to Improve Your Bees

Click here for a Queen Rearing Timeline

Click here for How to set up a Jenter Kit

Click here for How to set up an Apidea

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How to use your Jenter Kit

Gimlet — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 16:46:35 +0000

Once you have your Jenter Kit set up you are ready to put it into action. Click here if you need the Jenter Kit Set Up instructions

Click here for a timetable to use your Jenter kit with a Cloake board system

Which Queen to breed from

For this to work well you need to choose your queen with care.

She should be young and she should be laying full tilt. If the weather has been poor, there is a good chance she won’t be and you should feed for a week beforehand.

Ideally you will have chosen your queen mother using Colony Assessment and Appraisal records from the previous year. If you don’t have records – how do you know what you are breeding?

Some bees are angelic in the early spring – butter wouldn’t melt – but come summer when they are at full strength it’s a different story altogether.

Other things to be aware of

Remember, the Jenter kit sticks out a bit. If you are using castellations in your brood box you may find that the face of the Queen cage is pressed too close to the adjoining frame for the bees to access the queen. This can be overcome by cutting a square out of an old frame – this allows the bees to access the queen. You can leave this frame in after you have removed your Jenter frame and the bees quite quickly refurbish the frame, filling the space with drone comb.

Try to site the Jenter frame near the centre of the brood nest where there are plenty of nurse bees.

If you are using plain runners, remove a frame and space them appropriately.

Timing

Timing is not as easy as it seems. Consider these points:

As we know the best age larvae are between 12 and 36 hours old – that’s 84-108 hours including the 3 days as an egg depending on who you talk to.
If you put your queen into the cage on say… Tuesday and remove her at the same time Wednesday – how old are those eggs ?
You don’t know do you – they could be one hour old and they could be 12 or 24.
You could start guessing the angle they are leaning over at but that’s all very subjective.
Or you could put her in for just 12 hours then you could be more sure but the chances are – you’ll find only half the frame laid up. Or not at all.
It’s a safe bet that the queen doesn’t get straight down and lay into the frame. Instead she will trundle about a bit and the workers will do the same. Then the workers will have to hoover out the cells before the queen can lay into them.
Better then to assume that after 24 hours with the queen in the cage – the eggs will be mostly around 12 hours old.

Here’s what I do…

…I put the queen into the cage at about 19.00hrs – come hell or high water and I take her out next day at the same time – come hell or high water. I make the aforementioned assumption that the queen gets laying after about 12 hours. You can cogitate if you like, about whether I’m right or wrong but the fact is that the following works for me:

Call the day the queen comes OUT of the frame ‘day zero’ For me, day zero is usually a Wednesday and at 19.00hrs and assume these eggs are about 12 hours old;
Thursday 19.00hrs – day 1 (36 hours);
Friday 19.00 – day 2 (60 hours);
Saturday 19.00 – day 3 (84 hours)
Sunday MORNING at about 7.00am they will be 96 hours old;
At about 9.00 Sunday morning I take the frame out;
The larvae will average about 98 hours old in total – that’s the 72 hours as eggs plus an average of 16 hours as larvae.

Even if she laid her first egg immediately you shut her into the box – that egging event was only 110 hours ago and the larva that breaks from that first egg can only be 36 hours at the most. In my experience they are seldom that old.

There are over 100 plugs in a Jenter kit and you will find a range of sizes/ages of larvae there.

None of them will be too old and none of them will be eggs – so take your pick and transfer them to the bar frame then put the bar frame into your rearer colony.

Timetable

Acclimatise the Jenter Frame

Spray the Jenter frame with syrup and leave it in the hive for about 24 hours so the bees can clean it and it will start to smell beeish.

Call this Day -2

Put the Queen in the Jenter Box

The face of the Jenter box has a circular opening with a removable door. Remove the door, put the queen into the box and replace the little door.

Put the frame back into the hive and close it up.

Take note of the time and the date.

Call this Day -1

Take the Queen out of the Jenter box

24 hours later, check that the queen has laid up the box. If she has, remove the front plate and release her then replace the front plate.

This is Day 0

Put the Jenter frame back into the hive for another 4 days.

If she hasn’t laid sufficent eggs, you could leave her in for another 24 hours. If she still won’t lay into it – consider grafting instead.

Plug Day

Plug day is Day 4.

On Day 4, remove the Jenter frame from the hive. The frame should now contain an assortment of larvae for you to choose from.

Slot your plugs into the plug holders which you will have set into a bar frame and acclimatised in your cell raiser. Then put the bar frame into your cell raiser for the bees to raise queen cells. Transfer to Apideas or nucs when ripe.

Note from a hot summer

Here’s something to be aware of – in a very hot summer such as last year (2018), metamorphosis can speed up and queens will emerge much earlier than expected so be aware of that possibility and don’t be ambushed like wot I was – with virgins running around all over the place. It was ridiculous.

Click here for a timetable to use the Cloake board system with a Jenter kit

Click here for Queen rearing using the Cloake Board method

Click here for How to Improve Your Bees

Click here for How to set up your Jenter Kit

Click here for How to Graft

Click here for How to set up an Apidea

The post How to use your Jenter Kit first appeared on Beespoke Info.

How to Introduce a queen bee to an Apidea

Gimlet — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 10:34:39 +0000

Mostly Apideas are used to rear queens from queen cells. However, there are occasions when you may want to introduce a laying queen or a virgin into an established Apidea.

Here’s a simple introduction method:

You’ll need one of the flat plastic postal cages;
Plug the gate with candy if you are using candy;
An alternative is to enclose the open end (after you have added the queen) in a couple of layers of newspaper – smear with a little honey and secure with an elastic band;
Make sure you remove the plastic gateway if it is a new cage;
Add in your queen – on her own – no escort;
Remove the red plastic ventilation grille from the front panel of your Apidea;
Slide the door panel up to the top so it covers the gap left by the grille;
There is now a nice size cavity between the door panel and the first frame;
Add your queen cage into it thus:

Click the photo for a close up

Replace the crown-board and roof;
Put the ventilation grille somewhere safe;
Leave for a few days

If you haven’t got a postal cage you could use a queen shuttle. Click here for how to make an Apidea Shuttle

Click here for How to set up an Apidea

The post How to Introduce a queen bee to an Apidea first appeared on Beespoke Info.

Quick queen bee introduction – Paper Bag Method

Gimlet — Sat, 27 Jun 2015 21:24:58 +0000

Introducing a new queen can be a tedious, long-winded process. Here’s a good quick method of introducing her 1 hour after removing the old one. No seven day gap, no removing of queen cells, no stressed bees. Yes, it works – I’ve tried it.

Here’s what to do:

This method is based on Snelgrove’s ingenious One Hour Method using a Matchbox.

Click here for more on that

Or click here for some useful background info.

Paper Bag Method

Dequeen your target hive. Put her into a nuc for the duration just in case!
Leave the colony for an hour to realise their queenless state;
Shake, scrape or scoop about 50 worker bees from the same colony into a paper bag, screw up the neck so they can’t escape and leave them alone for about 10 minutes;
Get your new queen and drop her into the paper bag with the workers and leave them together for about half an hour;
During this time the workers will feed the new queen. They will become accustomed to her and she will take on their particular smell;
Leave them alone together for about half an hour or till your target colony has had its queenless hour;
Peirce a few small holes with a pin or some fine sharp instrument but be careful not to spear your queen;
Part the frames in the middle of the hive, slip the paper bag between them and close the frames together again so the bag can’t drop;
Walk away and stay away for about a week.

Click here for the Introduction Cage Method

Click here for the Matchbox method

Click here for the Paper bag method

Click here for How to Introduce a queen bee to an Apidea

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Cloake Board Method of Queen Rearing

Gimlet — Fri, 26 Jun 2015 10:54:40 +0000

A Cloake board is an essential piece of kit for anyone considering rearing their own queens. The method utilises a queen-right colony ensuring the best quality queens.

Click here for a timetable for the Cloake board system

The Board

Cloake boards can be bought from beekeeping suppliers such as Thornes. Click here for Thornes Cloake Board. Although they are simple enough to make.

As mine are all in use – here’s a temporary photo borrowed from Thornes to assist my description. I hope they don’t mind.

Basically it consists of a queen excluder with a bee space underneath. On top are some lats equipped with grooves to hold a removable slide which can be made of metal or plywood. Ideally the space between the top surface of the slide and the bottoms of the frames in the box above should not be more than a beespace or the bees will draw down wax during the course of this procedure and that can cause obstruction and delay.

The Method

The method utilises a strong queen-right colony in a double brood box. The board is placed between the two boxes and when the slide is inserted, it makes half of the colony temporarily queenless. During 3 queenless days, grafts or cells from a Jenter or Cupkit are introduced and there is a high degree of acceptance. The colony is then made queen-right again, the bees are returned to their right-minds and calmly raise excellent quality cells.

If the colony is set up early in the season several iterations are possible – the frames being rearranged after each crop of cells is removed.

Procedure

You will need:

A strong colony of bees in a double brood box not swarming or even thinking of swarming;
A spare brood box;
A feeder and strong syrup;
A frame of pollen if there isn’t one in your strong colony

Day 0

1. Find the queen and put her somewhere safe on the frame you found her;
2. Turn the floor so it is facing the opposite direction and block the entrance;

Now sort the frames removing any lumps of wax from the bottoms as you go or these will impede your slide later. The spare box comes in useful here. Into one box – Box B put all or most of the frames of eggs and larvae in one box and in the other Box A put the frames of capped brood, emerging brood and empty frames for the queen to lay into;
Now reassemble the hive. Put Box A onto the floor and put the queen, on her frame, into the middle of it;
Put the Cloake board (WITHOUT THE SLIDE) on top of Box A with the entrance facing the same direction as the original entrance;
Put Box B on top of the Cloake board and replace any supers

Day 7

At this point the bees in the top box will have no larvae young enough to make themselves a new queen. However, up until now they have been in contact with their queen through the queen excluder. This point is important.

Now add the slide – you will need a puff of smoke. This makes the bees in the top box effectively queenless.
Open the entrance at the back – the one in the floor – the one you blocked earlier.

The flying bees now depart from the bottom box but they will return to the entrance at the front – the one which now leads only to the queenless top box. This has a dual effect:

It depletes the population in the bottom box – which is now unable to think about swarming – if that thought had occurred to them it will now be forgotten.
It increases the population in the top box, perhaps doubling it, which intensifies the impression of queenlessness making them very welcoming of the small larvae you are about to add.

3. Now add your bar frame to acclimatise and get a bit of a bee-ish smell to it.

4. Make sure there is a frame of pollen next to it;

5. If you are neurotic – like me – expect the unexpected and go quickly through to make sure there are no queen cells in the top box;

6. If there is no flow or if they are a bit on the light side you should add a feeder and feed a heavy syrup (2:1).

Day 8

Retrieve your bar frame;
Add your day old larvae either as grafts or from a Jenter or CupKit.

If you are using a Jenter or Cupkit you will know your larvae will be a little less than 4 days old – 3 days as eggs and in their 1st day as larvae. If you have grafted – you can be less sure.

Day 9

1. Remove the slide
2. Block the back door

Day13

Cells are capped and the queens will emerge on Day 20/21 depending on exactly when the eggs hatched.

At this point, if you have supers on, lift the brood box containing your cells up on top of the supers. This should stop the bees from drawing comb in amongst and around your queen cells.

Day 18

Get your cells into Apideas

Day 20/21

Cells hatch/queens emerge

Click here for a Cloake board system timetable

Click here for How to set up an Apidea

Click here for How to set up your Jenter Kit

Click here for How to Graft

Click here for How to improve your Bees

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Irish Queen Bees for Sale

Gimlet — Mon, 22 Jun 2015 09:38:06 +0000

Sorry – sold out for 2015

Native Irish queen bees for sale (Apis mellifera mellifera) – ready now.

Selected for good temperament, productivity and low-swarming. Click here for more about JanesBees

Contact Jane info@beespoke.info

Click here for more about the Native Irish Bee

Click here for Bee Improvement

Click here for Colony Assessment

Click here for Colony Appraisal

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How to set up your Jenter Kit

Gimlet — Sat, 06 Jun 2015 19:51:14 +0000

Here’s how to set up your Jenter kit. It’s how I did mine and that’s now working well.

By the way, be warned – the bees won’t like it when it’s new and the queen will be reluctant to lay into it. So get it set up and into a strong colony to get it drawn out and smelling beeish before you trot the queen into it.

There are basically three parts to the system – the frame, the plugs and the bar frame.

The Frame

Here’s some photo’s to show how to set up the frame – click each of them for a close-up.

First remove the wedge from the frame. Drill a small hole into each of the little feet at the bottom of the legs and screw them, centre frame, into the recess thus:

If you then trim a bottom bar to size you can pin it crosswise to the side bars and wire the plug box (note plugs in frame) to it like this:

Get a sheet of foundation and cut a couple of pieces to fit either side. Cut a couple of lengths of the wedge to hold it in place:

You now need to get the bees to draw this so put it into a strong colony. Leave the front plate off so the bees have unrestricted access to the face of the cell box. If need be add a feeder so what you are aiming for is this:

The Plugs

Here’s a photo of the plug holders – yellow. The plug-housing and plugs themselves are the brown bits:

There are two types of yellow plug holders – ribbed and smooth. Given the choice – go for the ribbed holders. The bees glue the smooth holders to the frame and you’ll have to prise them loose with your hive tool. The ribbed holders come out quite easily which is important when you are stressed while trying to be calm and gentle.

As for the plugs themselves – they’re self explanatory really – they’re the smaller brown parts and they fit into the back of the cell box. When you have got them laid up (see photo below) – the plug is removed from the frame and pushed into the larger winged housing and then the whole thing is pushed into the cell holder of your choice. See photo above.

Below is a photo of some cells in the Jenter cell box containing day-old larvae – click it for a close up:

These larvae are very well provisioned and the light reflecting off the brood food is making this photo a bit misleading. The best cell to look at is the second cell down on the left hand side – the one with the dark base. You can see the little tiny c-shaped larva quite clearly in the very centre of the cell in the midst of the gleaming circle of royal jelly.

This where a Jenter or CupKit has the edge on grafting – I defy anyone to lift larvae this small with the grafting tool of their choice and transfer it to a grafting frame without damaging it.

Bar Frame

This is a photo of a frame fitted with two slightly wonky, metal bars ready to receive twenty laid up Jenter plugs. It can then go into your cell-rearer colony. All you need to do is cut two slots to house the metal.

If like me you cack-handedly cut your slots a bit on the generous side a couple of strategically placed upholstery pins or matchsticks can sort it out.

After a further 10/11 days in your cell raiser colony, the cells will be ready to go into your Apideas thus:

By the way, if you think you may need to fit roller cages make sure you leave enough room between the two bars.

Now all that remains is to learn how to use it!

Click here for How to put your Jenter Kit into use

Click here for Cloake Board method of Queen Rearing

Click here for How to Set up an Apidea

Click here for a Queen Rearing Timeline

Click here to listen to Piping Queens

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What to do with queenless Apideas

Gimlet — Tue, 12 May 2015 11:01:14 +0000

An annual quandry for beekeepers is – what to do with all those queenless Apideas at the end of the queen-rearing season.

Most advice is to set the Apidea over a nuc and unite the two but this often comes to one sort of sticky end or another and is less viable when you have a number of them.

Here’s a neat alternative:

The Quandry

At the tail-end of last year’s queen-rearing season I found myself with a bunch of sad, queenless and broodless Apideas and one queen-right Apidea with no home to go to.

It occurred to me that the solution was staring me in the face. This method is more or less the same we use to create Apideas and hinges on the ‘Third Box Principle’ of uniting bees.

Click here for Apidea Instructions.

Click here for more on the Third Box Principle.

Here’s what to do…

Find the queen and put her into a matchbox;
Gently shake all of the bees out of all of the Apideas into a plastic bucket spraying them lightly with water;
Find a nuc box, block the entrance with foam then add two frames of stores, a frame of pollen and leave a space in the middle;
Pour the bucket of bees into the space, give them another bit of a spray if they’re coming up at you;
Drop the queen in on top of them then carefully add two empty, drawn frames into the space;
If you are worried about your queen, cage her first and suspend the cage between the middle frames;
Close it up and take it away;
You can feed it but be careful – this is the robbing season.

As I say, that’s what I did last year. That nuc came steaming through the winter and is now into a full box. Of course I could have been just lucky but I’ll try it again and let you know how I get on.

An alternative is to overwinter a queenright Apidea and decant it into a nuc in the spring.

Click here for more on how to overwinter an Apidea

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