In this video Laurence Edwards walks viewers through his new Heka dedicated queen cell incubator, explaining why he moved away from a modified Brinsea unit to a purpose‑built system that works with his preferred Nico hair‑roller cages and JZ Beezy cell cups. He highlights the incubator’s German engineering, double‑glazed door, fine ventilation control, and a high‑capacity humidity tank that drip‑feeds water to maintain precise humidity. The unit holds two trays, each accommodating 98 Nico cages (196 total), enabling a roughly three‑week rearing cycle. Edwards notes the purchase price of about £1,200, arguing that the reliability and longevity of a purpose‑built Heka outweigh cheaper DIY alternatives. He projects a seasonal output of 300‑500 queens and mentions that he will also sell F1 virgin queens directly from the incubator, inviting interested beekeepers to contact him. The video ends with a plug for another tutorial on grafting queens.
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In this video, I'm going to show you my new dedicated queen cell incubator from Heka. So last year I bought myself a queen incubator from Brinsea, and I used that for various purposes, raising some eggs in it as well. I did use it for raising some queen cells, and it was a right old faff, it really was. So it required some major modification in order for me to put bars of queen cells into it. So I could have modified it, I could have put something to kind of hold these bars on it, but as I discussed in previous videos, I'm really not a massive fan of using the the Nico system, but I do like the Nico hair roller cages. So with the system that I've got here with the JZBZ cups, the roller cages don't fit on like that. But as I've showed in other videos, if you put the hair roller cages and have a way of supporting them upright, then the JZBZ cell cups will just balance on the top. So I've gone off on a little bit of a tangent there, but the explanation for that is that I needed some sort of system that was going to hold the hair roller cages upright in order for me to balance the JZ Beezy cell cups on the top of them. Now that might sound like the most ridiculous demand to have in a queen incubator. There are gonna be so many other ways of doing this. But you need to find something that works for you. I really do like the JZ Beezy cell cup system. Find it so much easier to work with kind of out in the field, bringing things back, moving things around. And they just don't do a decent hair roller cage, or one that I'm yet to be able to find. So this is the system that I'm going with, and this is what's led me down the route of the Heka incubator. So it's a dedicated incubator for rearing queens. It's built around the Niko Hair roller cage system, and it gives you these purpose-made trays that fit into the incubator, and that gives me the ability just to balance my JZ Beezy cell cups on top of those cages. So it's a German-made incubator, cost me in excess of £1,200, so I know you could probably make something like that for £50, but I just wanted something that was ready-made, something that was gonna last well, something that was gonna be really, really reliable, And also something that was gonna give me very fine control over the humidity. So let's go and take a look at the queen incubator. I've got it just downstairs. Right, so here is my incubator that I'm gonna use to rear my queens this year. Lots of nice functionality on this incubator. You've got ventilation control there that's really nice and fine. Good quality controls so you can really reduce down the amount of air going into it or increase it up again like that. The door, it is superb. So it's a fully double-glazed unit. And then the door has got a very nice positive seal to it like that. You can feel whenever you open and close that door, rock solid. And when you open it up, you can see you've got the seals all the way around like that. The dials, really easy. Turn it on, and as you can see, it starts to glow like that, and the fans come on straight away. I really, really like this incubator. And the only reason I bought it, for one simple reason, is that it had these trays ready-made to work with the Nico Hair Roller Cages. They're completely supported. They stand up on their own, really nice solid connection, and it means it gives me the ability to not have to connect my Nico hair roller cages onto my JZBZ cups. For me, that is a massive benefit. Inside the incubator here, you get 2 of these trays, and on each tray it will take 98 Nico hair cages. So a total of 196 cages per incubator. I'm not gonna bore you with the temperature and humidity controls, but you can adjust the humidity on this knob here. Got a big tank that sits up at the top. That feeds water to the inlet at the back using a really nice high-quality connection. So we're not gonna get any leaks, and it's just gonna drip feed that water into the internal incubator atmosphere to maintain that perfect humidity. Now this incubator definitely wasn't cheap, but I really wanted to have that solution to use those trays. Got it from a company called Heka, and they do actually provide the trays purpose-made to go into your own incubator. So if you think this incubator's too expensive, and before people start telling me I can build this for kind of like 50 quid, I know you could build this for way cheaper than I bought it for. I paid around £1,200 for this incubator. I think it's going to last me years and years. Purpose-built. I want something that's very, very reliable. German incubators by Heka are some of the best that you can get in Europe. I think it's going to provide me with a really long service life. So that's the first look at the queen incubator. I'm going to use that a lot this year. 196 cages that it can hold, and you get around a 3-week cycle roughly in terms of putting the cells in there, taking them out, and the availability again. So hopefully the target this year is to rear anywhere between say 300 and 500 queens. Not sure how many of those I'll get mated, but we will see. Also going to be offering virgins direct from that incubator as well. So if you're in the market for some F1 virgin queens that you want to get mated to your own local drones, give me a shout. I do need to know about those in advance though. If you're interested in learning more about queen rearing, check out this video here where I show you the full process on how to graft queens.
