Queen Rearing.

It was a grand day oot at a queen breeding workshop. If you’re seriously into the subject, and I am not (yet), you select the colony from which you wish to breed and remove some young larvae – that is, about six hours since it hatched from the egg; in theory, it should work with eggs, but it doesn’t – the bees reject them. The larvae are removed on a grafting tool, in our case, a small paint brush, and then placed in an artificial queen cup – see first extra. The operation requires a steady hand, a strong binocular magnifying lens (about 5 dioptre should do) and a bright light (LEDs work well as they don’t create heat and desiccate the little follow). For scale, the cup is about 5/16ths of an inch diameter.
 
The next stage in the procedure is to put a bank of about twenty charged queen cups into a breeder colony: one that is very strong (lots of bees) but no queen. If you’re lucky, something over half of the grafts will work and the breeder colony will feed the larvae up to full size and then seal them into their cells when you have a week until they are due to emerge as adults to decide what to do. The serious chaps will stick them straight into an incubator and start another batch off while lesser mortals will either put them into a Blue Peter queenless colony or into a mating nuc, but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for that instalment.
 
Everyone on the workshop had the opportunity to walk away with a queen, in a queen cell, due to emerge on Tuesday. Here, the ladies were at a big advantage, the ideal safe place to keep the queen at the ideal temperature is in your cleavage; not having been warned beforehand, I had forgotten to take mine with me. Unfortunately, the cage used to protect her ladyship is very uncomfortable underneath your clothing, particularly if you have a meat-cleaver scar on your chest.
 

Ochils Bee Breeding Group organised the event and, afterwards, we went to visit their mating apiary. There were about two dozen small hives (each about 10 inches cube) scattered about a tennis court sized orchard. The second extra is of a lost mating swarm on the side of one of the hives. When the queen goes off on a mating flight, she has an escort; there’s safety in numbers and, if there are few hundred bees with the queen, she is less likely to be predated. The queen in the middle of this cluster couldn’t find her way home and has spent several hours trying to find her entrance in this wrong box; the entrance is around to the left but she won’t go in there as it is occupied, so they were scooped up into another box and left to sort themselves out.