>            Am looking for suggestions on methods best suited for a someone
> trying to raise perhaps a dozen queens for the first time.  I am 
> overwhelmed
> by the amount of information out there.

Don't be, it really isn't that complicated.  I tried grafting for the first 
time last year with improvised tools and failed.  I broke down and ordered a 
grafting tool.  By the time it showed up in the mail I had the whole thing 
figured out.  I raised 11 queens last year with out any special equipment 
and little effort.

Wait until you see drones are flying.  Set up your nucs with two empty 
frames, one frame of honey, one frame of emerging brood and one frame with 
pollen and eggs.  All frames go in with the nurse bees attached.  The 
emerging brood is going to gobble up your pollen, so you need to add a 
little pollen substitute and some kind of syrup feeder.  They don't need 
much.  In the beginning, they will not have a lot of foragers, the older 
bees will fly back to the parent hive.  They will need a little feed boost.

The bees take care of the rest.  It takes 16 days to raise a queen from an 
egg.  It takes a total of 27 days to raise a laying queen from an egg.

During this time you should leave them alone.  But you won't.  :)  In a few 
days that frame with eggs should have a dozen (more or less) queen cells on 
it.  The bees will abort some.  The strongest virgin queen should kill off 
the weaker queens.  Some times the bees fail, most of the time they don't. 
If they don't like the new queen, they may supersede her with her own eggs. 
It is always a good thing to have some spare queens.

There is a little maintenance involved.  A new queen lays like crazy.  She 
will always need some empty comb to lay in.  When one of her frames start to 
emerge, it really fills out a nuc.  You will need to bring some capped brood 
back to the parent colony once in a while.

Housing became a problem for me.  I had a bank incident where the nurse bees 
rejected all but one queen, I lost four queens that way.  They just refused 
to feed them.  I started a double queen hive, just to house queens.  I had 
no real plan to start a new hive.  The bees had other ideas.  It really did 
well in the middle of that drought and it is my strongest hive now.  I 
combined it in late August to a single queen hive.

After I required in August.  I left two nucs to fend for themselves.  They 
raised new queens again and survived the winter with little help from me. 
So far, all my hives are doing well with out hard chemicals.

Kirk Webster came to speak to us at Backyard Beekeepers.  He has got a lot a 
great ideas.  Right now, I am weaning my hives out of deeps and into 
mediums.  I'm going to go all mediums.  Hive bodies, supers, nucs, 
everything.  First because my back can't handle the deeps and second so 
every frame is interchangeable.  I'm making Kirk's style nucs by dividing 
mediums with division feeders, to step up my output.  I'll be doing more 
with less.  I am going to take another crack at grafting, just for the fun 
of it.

If I keep this up, I'm going to need an outyard!  I'm working on a home page 
with pictures of all this.  Watch for the post.

Jim Hock
Wethersfield, CT 

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