The queen breeding is also called the poetry of beekeeping. The reports on the beginning of queen rearing in our country date back to the time of our most renowned beekeeper, Anton Janša (1734 -1773). In old times, queen rearing was connected with extraordinary swarming, which is a consequence of beekeeping in small hives. Swarming is the natural method for the queen bees to get younger. But because in advanced beekeeping swarming is restricted as much as possible, queen rearing is an important discipline of beekeeping. In Slovenia we foster our indigenous Carniola bee breed (Apis mellifera carnica Poll.), which is also highly regarded throughout the rest of the world, and in Europe it is even the leading breed. Its qualities are tameness, high honey yield and resistence to disease. Therefore, the queen bees fostered in Slovenia are a first-class export commodity and are highly sought-after abroad.
The first steps of queen rearing are very much like the process of royal jelly production. The cell bars hold the queen cups made out of beeswax with help of a special mould. In each cup we put a drop of royal jelly diluted with destilled water with stactometer and thus is the cell bar prepared for grafting of larvae.
We remove a comb of young larvae from the bee colony with above average characteristics and brush off the bees from it, then put it on a stand to make our task easier. We illuminate the comb with a lamp to better see the larvae in their cells. Then we start catching as small larvae as possible from cells with a special grafting tool. With queen breeding this is even more important than with royal jelly production, because this ensures better quality of reared queens. It is known that in the first few hours after hatching from an egg, the larva receives the same food regardless of whether it will be reared into a worker bee or a new queen. Such larvae should not be more than a couple of hours old. The larva is resting at the bottom of the cell and is shaped like a crescent moon. We carefully grab it from the back side and transfer it to a drop of royal jelly in the queen cup. For an experienced beekeeper this is an easy task.
After grafting the larvae into all the cups on a cell bar, the bar is ready for the insertion into a bee colony. The bee colony needs to be prepared for the rearing of queen cells beforehand. The queen cell is an oblong cell, suspended upside down in which a queen is reared. It should be noted, that queen cells must be reared by a strong bee colony, where there is a sufficient number of young nurse bees. Such colonies are called rearing colonies. In the brood chamber where the cell with the queen is located, we choose two combs of uncapped brood and move it to the middle of food chamber. In the process we have to be careful not to move the queen together with the brood to the food chamber. We then put a special frame with a cell bar with grafted larvae between the two brood combs in the food chamber. The queen excluder that separates the brood chamber from the food chamber in the hive has to be almost fully covered with a hardboard to allow the bees only a few centimeters of free passage. This has to be done so the bees in the food chamber think they are queenless and quickly start feeding additional larvae in cups with royal jelly.
The cell bar with mature queen cells has to be removed from the rearing colony, before young queens begin to hatch. This occurs nine or ten days after grafting of larvae. We take out the cell bar and gently brush off the bees, because young queens in queen cells are very sensitive to tremors in this stage of development. The queen cells can be put into an incubator, where young queens will hatch, or they can be transfered directly into mating nuclei. A mating nucleus is a small hive for breeding queens, where a queen stays until her first mating. Queen bees hatch on the 15th or 16th day after an egg was laid into a cell.
The trailer shows mating nuclei for queen breeding and their arrangement on the field.
We added a mature queen cell to a bee colony in a mating nucleus from which a young queen would hatch in a couple of hours.
In a suitably nice weather, a young queen has usually mated ten days after hatching and must start laying eggs. The fertilization takes place outside the hive in nature. In a couple of days, the queen makes several flights out of the hive and makes her mating flight, where she mates with several drones (8 to 25). She mates only once in a lifetime. The trailer shows the control of a young queen`s egg laying. The beekeeper opens the mating nucleus, takes out the comb and checks if its cells already contains newly layed eggs.
A young queen has sucessfully mated and started laying eggs. The beekeeper – queen breeder, takes her out of the mating nucleus and marks her with a special coloured lamella. He puts her into a special cage – queen cage together with a couple of worker bees and so the queen is ready for shipping to a beekeeper.
Marked queens in queen cages are ready for mail shipping, but the beekeeper could also receive them in person. The footage was taken at queen breeder, Avgust Bučar from Janče.