The punch method of getting queen cells

Regular reader and commenter Joan asked what I used to punch the grafts.

It's a bit of 12mm steel tube (that's half and inch if you live in a backward country), sharpened with a file.

And a pencil for pushing the graft through.

I will of course, blog on the success (or otherwise) of this first attempt at punch grafting.

I am concerned about two things: the first is the strength of the colony and their nectar flow.  It's a hive that swarmed and the new queen failed to materialise.  You need a strong colony to raise queens.  The second is the age of the larvae.  I'm not sure what a three-day-old larva looks like, so I chose the smallest I could see.

I'll check the "finishing colony" in eight days time and report back.

New queen is a star

Here is the new star of the show - a lovely big healthy queen, dressed in a delicate shade of fluorescent green - much like the home life of our own dear royal family.


She has layed four frames of brood since she came on to lay about 14 days ago. The photo above shows what a great queen she is. This is the perfect frame, with an arc of brood (the biscuit coloured area) surrounded by stores - pollen and honey. The lighter shaded capped cells are full of honey.

Avid followers of this blog will both remember that this colony was queenless from about 28th April, following the queen wing-clipping debacle.

But it's back on song now, and I'm predicting a good harvest in the autumn.

Queen No. 3 found and marked

The swarm I collected last Monday (the Bank Holiday) has drawn at least four frames of brood comb and the queen has layed in most of two sides - I stopped counting.

Wow. This is some huge queen. See photo below of queen sporting new green adornment. Yes, I know she's probably last year's queen (or older) becuase this was a prime swarm. And the fact that she is laying so soon after swarming is (I think) another indication that she is mature. But the green pen was to hand - and it's better than nothing.


These bees seem more prone to festooning that the previous colony. They run to the bottom of the frame and hang off it. But they seem very gentle. But there again - it is a lovely day. 22 degrees celsius and no wind. So what's not to like?

So we now have three queen-right colonies. Good oh.

But the question is what to do with this nuc? They can't stay in this box for long.

Queen No. 1 found and marked!

Hey, I might make a beek yet!

I found and marked the new queen in D's hive (the one with the sheep guarding it).

She's only small - but she is laying. No photos unfortunately.

So she took from 2nd May (as a sealed queen cell) until about yesterday (29th May) to emerge, get mated, and start laying.

Whew! Relief.

Catching queens

This is just three of the six queens that we took from one colony yesterday, during the training session for novice beekeepers at the club. The middle one is in a proper queen cage. It has a plug of candy (sugar) in the entrance so that when the cage is put into a queenless colony, the queen will have sufficient "face time" (aaargh) for the colony to become accustomed to her scent and accept her.

These queens will be used to re-queen queenless colonies (perhaps mine if my virgin queens have not done the business and returned).

The other two are, yes, hair rollers. They provide the perfect mix of shape, ventilation, easy of use, colour coding. They are mounted in small wooden blocks that can be easily stored in a box.

Instructor Alan removes a queen from the queen cell. Steady hands are needed. Fifty-five years of beekeeping helps, as well. Note hair roller cage at the ready.


This cell is a bit tough. The drone uncapping fork is used to good effect, even though it wasn't designed for this job.

Colony now queenless

Disaster. Something I did (maybe) has killed the queen. I marked her two weeks ago. One week ago I split off a nucleus - which was succesful ( I went to see it yesterday at my friend D's).

But my colony now has no queen. The queen I marked is nowhere to be seen.

There are no eggs in the cells - further evidence.

But one of the swarm cells (see last week's entry) has been vacated - so I may have a virgin queen in there. So opening the hive was the last thing I should have done (had I known). Virgin queens are easy to upset.

I must cross my fingers and hope that either the virgin queen is OK, goes off to mate, and comes back and starts laying, or one of the other queen cells yields a new queen.

So I must wait another two weeks before opening the hive.

Spring Clean

Time to clean out the hive, and add a queen excluder. It's now 17 degrees C and so it's safe to open up. Any colder and it would risk chilling the brood and killing them - which would set the colony back a few weeks.

My friend Julie helped me today. She is on the right, wearing the decorating overalls and my spare veil. It's the first time she's handled bees and she did really well - totally fearless!

There's good news and feared results of my inexperience. The good news is that the colony is in fine fettle. Really strong, with plenty of stores. The 2.5Kg bag of Apifonda (see previous posts) has been totally devoured. There is a lot of pollen being stored, and plenty of uncapped and capped brood.

The bad news is that there was a lot of brace comb. Natural comb that they had made because I left a gap in the hive - as a result of last September's Ivy Emergency (see previous entry). I had to put on a new box (a super) to accommodate the ivy honey flow and ivy pollen they were bringing in. But I had only a few spare frames - not enough to fill the box.

I was afraid that they would make this natural comb - but I hoped that I was early enough in the year to forestall it. But the weather has bee fine and sunny, and the results are in the photo. The roof has several well-developed combs attached.
I broke them off the roof, and in doing so, I spotted the queen for the first time. Or rather, Julie did. I have bought a marker pen (Red for 2008 - she's last year's queen). But I was too anxious about getting her back into the hive, that I didn't mark her. So that's an opportunity missed.

I broke up the comb and left it close by for the bees to take back any honey they had stored.

The last photo shows a couple of workers cleaning up the comb.

So my hive is now in good shape. It has a queen excluder, with the queen definitely below it!


It has a new polycarbonate roof, so that I can see what's going on without opening it.

And the queen is laying.

And so roll on the honey!

And as a nice bonus, we ate some of the honey comb with a cup of tea! Lovely. Very flowery - Daffs and Primroses, I guess. There are no trees flowering yet.

As part of the spring-clean, I bought a new brood box and super. So I can now return the boxes I borrowed from my friends Debbie and Mary, who have helped me so much with the bees. I bought new stuff from Maisemore. Delightful people. And they keep the most handsome chickens - running around in the road and car park (yes, it's pretty rural!). So I got some eggs too! Highly recommended.