Several years ago I decided it would be fun to try raising queens. My first cells were not very impressive, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly. Occasionally there is still a graft that fails, but nothing is 100% I suppose.

When I first started with mating nucs, I thought it was important to arrange the nucs in distinctive ways that would make it easier for the virgin queens to find the right home on the way back from their midair mating flights. It turned out that they know their way back home better than I ever would have guessed. Last year I had extra full-size equipment, and I got a good mating percentage on 4-way pallets sitting close together (about 80% as I recall).

Normally I do not use full-size equipment. We have a number of 4-frame nucs that I usually use. Here you can see that the two outside nucs have their entrances facing one direction, and the middle nuc is flipped around to face the other way.

I keep a few lines of nucs that were started on different batches of cells. I often mix around the different colors of nucs, but I don't find that it makes much difference in practice.

Here's a line that is all light green.

I'm not doing this on a grand scale, but it's useful to have queens on hand. It's also fun to ship them around the country--it's one of those interesting activities that never entered my mind for years and years.

Well, it's starting to feel disturbingly cool for June. It is pretty comfortable for most people to have the temperature below eighty degrees, but I start to worry about the bees. Sometimes they bring in some June honey when the temperature is in the mid-seventies. I recall a summer many years ago when it was never terribly warm, rained at night every two or three days, and the bees still managed to produce a decent crop. The recent rain hasn't just been at night however. I see some nectar coming into some of the parent colonies--even into some of the honey supers rather than the brood chambers.

In any case, the main honey flow rarely comes before July in our area. There should be a few more weeks before it's time to get really concerned. Still, I think if it warms up we could get a nice honey flow right now--every time the weather turns for the better they are really getting out on the Dutch clover. Some of the pastures look like it rained flowers on them.

Despite the relative coolness, the bees have thrived to this point. Here is an image of a heavy load of pollen with some nectar in a nice fresh comb. It is proof of their energy despite some cooler temps.

We have been through a lot of queens this year. The splitting season didn't start out in a very encouraging manner, but things turned around within a couple of weeks. Luckily, we had plenty of customers looking for queens even when we were not quite ready to use them. Our earlier queens went into a queen bank and then got shipped all over the country.

Looking into a nurse hive. It's important to put in plenty of bees and some brood to make sure the queens are fed properly. You can see the tops of the cages in the middle of the box:

Here is a lineup of plastic cages covered with nurse bees:

Pulling out a queen to be shipped:

Our first Iowa-raised queens are emerging this week. Hopefully we'll have good mating weather and the queen yard gets filled up quickly!

We are in the middle of supering the overwintered parent colonies right now. A good portion of the bee yards have a strong honey flow that has gone on during the past week--hopefully some it winds up in the honey boxes rather than staying down in the brood chamber. The black locust bloom seems to be especially strong this year.

Before we put the supers on the parent colonies, we usually crack the brood boxes to make sure that they aren't on the verge of swarming. We split a number of hives twice, so the majority are happy to stay home for the moment, but there's always a few that grow quicker than the others and start to think about moving into a nearby tree.

When the cells are still open, it's usually possible to pull out a few frames of brood/honey and keep the old queen active. Here are a number of cells that are starting to get elongated--they have larvae and a pool of royal jelly inside:

By the time the cells get capped, it's much harder to get those bees to stay in the hive--a lot of times I just split the boxes and make sure there is at least one cell in each box. That way you just lose the old queen and some of the bees from one box instead of losing a lot of bees from both boxes. It is always an option to hunt down the queen and put her in another box that has lots of space, but it's too time consuming for us to search through overpopulated hives to find the queens in hives that are about to swarm (though sometimes I do it anyway).

Here is a capped cell:

The reproductive power of the bee has been extra impressive this year. Overall, the weather has cooperated in our area--fairly warm temperatures and good spring bloom. I had split a number of singles that we started in late April and early May. Yesterday they were totally packed and ready for a second brood box. I'm afraid that the huge amount of brood rearing has also helped the varroa mites get a headstart on the year. We'll hope for the honey crop first.