Saturday, April 26, 2014

How to Raise Your Own Queen

Last weekend, we had another beehive inspection of our Brooklyn hives. When we arrived, there was lots of activity at the hives. I can watch this all day! It's so interesting!
The goal for this inspection was to see if we had successfully raised a new Queen.  At our last inspection, we noticed that although the white hive survived the winter, the Queen in that hive did not.  We had successfully raised Queens before in the past so we know we can do it. 
 
We pulled some frames from the white hive and did not see the Queen so we had to find some freshly laid brood from our green hive and move it into our white hive in efforts to raise a new Queen.
This frame was full of bees, but the brood was all capped so this wasn't a good candidate.
A close up of some capped brood.
Video of looking for the brood frames.

On this frame, there was some freshly capped brood with some uncapped larvae. We pulled two frames like this and placed them into the white hive.
After placing the frames, we'll be back in a week to check on the hive to see if they make one of the larvae into a Queen.  Since this hive is Queenless, they will feed a larvae royal jelly and make it into a Queen cup. When the Queen hatches, it will go for a mating flight and start laying.  We're going to hope for the best! Wish us luck!

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