President's Message

Greetings,
It has been my long-term goal in beekeeping to produce queens and nucleus hives. So, over the next 12 weeks I'm going to try something I've never tried before, I’m going to start grafting 12-to-24-hour-old larva into artificial queen cups with the hope of producing queens. In the past, I’ve harvested queen cells by letting Mother Nature produce them for me using a procedure called “walk away splits”. This is done by taking a frame with eggs and placing it in a separate “queenless” hive with lots of nurse bees inducing them to raise numerous queen cells in an attempt to “requeen” their colony. I then harvested the queen cells, and I use them for splits. It’s really a fun way to produce some queens to start nucleus hives to overwinter and replace any “deadouts” in the spring. Any beekeeper who hasn’t tried it yet should. It will help your apiary be sustainable. More...