How to better organize your queen bee grafting frames - queen rearing operation

 In this article we will explain how we organize and setup our own queen rearing method, adding a few extra tips and tricks to keep the operation well organized. This blog post is probably directed at more advanced beekeepers running 20-50 hives wanting to expand, or any semi-commercial or commercial beekeeper.

One can raise queen bees in a bunch of different methods, such as walk away splits starting their emergency protocols, or saturation and triggering pre-swarming behaviors. One can use the push in hive tool trick on some 1-2 day old larva on existing brood comb, or go to the stage where one grafts young larva into separate cups called grafting, which we show below.

To very briefly touch the basics on the bee cycle, we are interested in grafting larva on day 4 of the worker bee cycle, meaning the egg has been in the cell for 3 days, and on the day the larva hatches is the day we intend to move / graft that larva into a special cell cup. In our case we utilize the NICOT queen rearing system. Well at least we use some part of it, as we keep things pretty traditional.

Basically we put 2x 14x grafts on 1 bar of a WSP frame and depending colony strength and saturation we place 1x or 2x frames into the cell starter colony.

If you observe very carefully on the above graft frame you may notice the green color within the grafts, this had been an experiment to better identify the amount of royal jelly being stored in the queen cups, without needing to open a few cells, thereby killing some queens in process to validate the feeding quality of the queens.

Basically we added a very saturated food dye into some sugar water, placed on the cell starter, which yielded blue / green royal jelly, which is quite easy to be see against the light and could help checking grafts. And no, the queen does not turn blue!

When looking at our graft frames, we generally have a color coding of our frames in general, such as:

White         standard brood comb
Green        Drone comb used in the brood chamber (can incur wax moth damage)
Pink/Red  Drone comb, which never hold brood, located over excluder (no wax moth damage)
Blue/Red   queen grafting frames

However on our Red/Blue graft frames we recently have added an extra piece, which is a strip of whiteboard.

usually people tend to write the dates of the day the graft bar has been inserted on to the frame. Assuming you run 10-20 cell builders, things can get a little interesting in terms of all the scribbles on the frames and trying to find space to scribble the new date on the frame. Hence we needed something which works a little better for us. 

Mini whiteboards for your graft frames:

   

Using whiteboard markers and the whiteboard strips stuck on those blue/red graft frames we can easily keep track of the graft dates, DNA source and also if we had bar merges etc, where you combine graft bars to free up unsuccessful graft bars, while being able to easily keep track of who is who, and which grafts hatches by which date. Additionally we usually stick an entire whiteboard on the top of the lid of the cell starters.

With Australian climate and UV exposure the paint of the whiteboard markers usually hold just long enough for the 2 weeks needed until they start to fade or being washed away, hence work nicely.

Construction explained:

Basically get the cheapest small whiteboard from your office supply shop in your area or online. In our case we went to OfficeWorks and picked up 20-30x on a special! :)

  

Measure your strips based on your frame bar size and start chopping the boards into strips. We only cut original white boards in half, as it gets a little scary once going closer to the bench saw blade. Also make sure you wear the appropriate PPE's while doing this task, as the whiteboard spray sharp bits and pieces all over.

Eventually you end up with the final product, ready to be used. 

Graft cup experiments:

If you again observe closely, looking at the frames, you may have noticed the different cell cups being used within the NICOT system. In one case we had used the standard plastic cups right of the shelf, in other instances we started coating the yellow and brown NICO cell cups and noticed way larger cells post coating them with extra bees wax. We came to a point that the NICO cell cups in a well fed cell starter colony actually could limit the size of the queen cells, and hence started making our own colored wax cups using food dye once again. This would allow the bees to alter the base size of the queen cells as needed. Additionally the change of the wax color helped us in the grafting activities, as it just makes the graft and cup more visible.

On Top:  painted / dipped NICO yellow/brown cups

Bottom:  colored wax cups

I'll try to write up a post on how we set up our queen cell starters and finishers in a different blog post, and I if I don't forget, will link it below.

Happy grafting!

Please let us know if this information had been useful on your journey to your first set of bee hives!

Feel free to browse to our complimentary Youtube channel which goes hand in hand with this blog.

Happy beekeeping,

The QuickWings Team

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