New Boxes For New Queens | Home | Lyon Bee Farm

Remember when I said we were jumping in with both feet? Did I mention we were jumping into the deep end? LOL. We have completely been bitten by the bee bug and are hooked for good. We have lost some bees, lost some queens, raised some bees, exploded some hives, split some hives, tried some new things just to see if we could, and found out that yes, we could. We have cut strips from comb with eggs and day old larvae on it and attached it to the top of frames and grew our own queens. Let me tell you, we were stoked!!! We have our own baby queens 🙂 . This is the beginning of the need for boxes and more boxes. While they were being capped, we realized we needed to have mating nucs for the new queens so they could take their mating flights and come back and lay eggs and grow their own hives. So, we built 10 new 3 frame mating nucs. We built 10 new feeder boxes and ladders to go in each. We carefully moved the queen cells into the 10 new boxes, filled with brood and bees from our big exploding hives. They all emerged 4 to 5 days after we put them in the mating nucs and again we were beyond excited. We waited, not well, hahaha, it is hard to wait and stay out of the hives when you are SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO wanting to see what is going on in there. OK, perhaps I have issues with waiting patiently. We stayed out for a whole WEEK!! When we did go look inside the 10 mating nucs, we found 5 mated queens returned. We were delighted that we had a 50% mated return rate. 5 new mated queens and it didn’t cost us anything. We had started another strip of eggs, and ordered some queen roller cages, so we could incubate them instead of simply placing the queen cells in the little 3 frame hives.( I forgot to mention, we also raise chickens and peafowl, so we already had the incubator ) Right after we started the next strip pf comb in the queenless hive, we read some more and learned that new queens can take up to 2 weeks to actually come back mated and ready to lay eggs. So while our new queen cells were being developed, and capped, we checked again, and found 2 more mated queens, and our first 5 had filled the 3 frame nucs completely up with eggs. Then came the box building rush. We needed 5 frame nuc boxes for all of our new queens. They needed room. So build we did!! We needed 10- 5 frame nucs, feeder boxes, ladders, frames, starter strips and fishing line strung to support our foundationless frames that we have found we prefer. 

So after the past weekend building the mating boxes, painting them and setting them up, we once again found ourselves building boxes. 

When we finally got our boxes and feeders built and painted, all the frames assembled and srtung and the starter strips installed, we were ready for the big transfer. Some people say move them 2 miles away when you move a hive, we don’t have that option. We have an acre, and boy do we do a lot with an acre. We placed the new 5 frame nucs around the yard. We have the original hives and our first splits on the south side of one of the garages, the 10 mating 3 frame nucs on the north side of the house on the other end of the yard. So we placed some of the new 5 frame nucs on the west side of the yard, a few on the north side by the 3 frame nucs and a couple on the south side by the original hives. We had one scatter out of the lot and we ended up with 6 out of the 10 new queens mated and now moved up to 5 frame nucs. We were ready to re-use the 3 frame nucs for our new batch of queens. 

Continuing to learn, we understood the need for a greater gene pool ( peafowl and chickens need big gene pools too in order to bring out the best they can offer)  so we decided to add some new genes to our little back yard pool.

Being the crazy eager BEEKS we are, we decided to buy more queens. Yes…. I said more Queens LOL !! 

Keep on keep’n Beezy!