In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey walks viewers through the essential steps for grafting queen larvae, a critical part of queen rearing. He begins by explaining why he split his longer queen‑rearing tutorial into shorter, focused videos, and then dives into the grafting process itself. Edwards compares two common grafting tools—a cheap Chinese plastic tool with a plunger and a stainless‑steel bent metal tool—explaining why he prefers the Chinese version for extracting and depositing larvae. He emphasizes the paramount importance of the angle of approach, insisting that the grafting tool must enter the cell at a 90‑degree angle, parallel to the cell walls, to minimize damage. The video also covers how to identify the optimal larval age (approximately day 4–5 after hatching) using a digital microscope, while warning that the microscope is unsuitable for actual grafting because its viewing angle hampers the required approach. Edwards demonstrates the step‑by‑step technique: using a fresh grafting tool, inserting the reed tip beneath the tiny larva, withdrawing it, then positioning the larva into a queen cup with a gentle plunger push. He stresses that mastering this skill requires repeated practice, fresh tools for each batch, and tracking acceptance rates, noting that a 50 % acceptance on a full frame is a realistic benchmark. The video concludes by situating grafting within the broader queen‑rearing workflow—cell builders, cell finishers, and mating—offering a modular roadmap for beekeepers seeking to breed their own queens.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Laurence Ederson, Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. In this video, I'm going to show you how to graft larva to rear queen bees. So I did a queen rearing video last year. It was about half an hour long, and it's had absolutely loads of views on YouTube. The feedback that I've got from it was it was a little bit long, and can I break the queen rearing sequence up into various different sections. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to break that sequence up. I'm going to show you how to build a cell builder. I'm going to show you how to do a cell finisher. I'm going to show you how to graft cells, which is what I'm going to do in this video today. And I'm going to show you how to get queens mated as well. So I'm going to cut down the queen rearing video into 5 or 6 different chunks, hopefully keep them around 5 or 6 minutes long. So in this video, I have bought a digital microscope from Amazon. I'll stick up my Amazon associate link so you can have a look and see whether this is something that you want to buy for yourselves. I'll get the caveat straight out of the way: I do not recommend this for grafting. So this is an amazing tool for having a look inside the cells and just having a little bit of a play. It's completely impractical for grafting, as you'll see later on in this video, and the reason for that is due to that angle in which you need to approach the larva to get the larva out of the So I'm going to show you how to do it on this microscope and you're going to see why I do not recommend this microscope for actually grafting your larva if it's something that you can't see. You're much better off with some sort of magnification glasses because then you can actually get in at the right angle. So I'll talk to you a little bit about the tools first. I've got 2 different grafting tools here. I've got a stainless steel grafting tool which is just a bent piece of metal with a curved end and then I've got a Chinese grafting tool. It's up to you, they're really, really cheap. That's about £4, you get 10 of those for about £2. I much prefer the Chinese one. I find it so much easier to A, get the larva out of the cells, but B, and this is the big important one for me, it's getting the larva off the grafting tool and into your little queen cups here. I find the process using the Chinese grafting tool so much easier because you have the ability to push against the little reed bit at the end. So whereas the stainless steel grafting tool, it is just a piece of metal and any manipulation in terms of getting the larva on and off is down to your own skill and the way that you move the grafting tool, the Chinese one has a plunger so you can push the larva off and it makes the whole process so much easier in my opinion. Again, ask any beekeeper, they're going to be split pretty much 50/50 I would say over this one. For me, I prefer the Chinese grafting tool. So the next thing to say about when you're grafting larva, and this is something where the digital microscope's come in really handy for me, to show you the different ages of what you're seeing in the cells. So obviously you have the eggs. When a queen lays a fertile egg, stays in that state for a few days, and then it hatches into a larva. And what you're trying to do is you're trying to get it around day 4 from laying. You're trying to get a very, very small larva. And I think this is where a lot of people fall down kind of in their first venture into grafting because it is difficult to see what's going on and you veer towards the bigger larva because they're a bit easier to see and they're a little bit easier to manage on either of these grafting tools. So the first tip that I'm going to give you is you need to get some way of seeing into this. And I thought the digital microscope was going to be the way. It's definitely not. I do not recommend this for grafting. And I'll tell you why the reason I don't recommend it for grafting is due to the Angle of approach. And I find the angle of approach is the probably the most important tip that I can give you for grafting. So if you can imagine you've got a cell with 2 sides and a bottom like that, what you need to do is you want your grafting tool to come down at 90 degrees, so completely parallel to the walls of the cell. With the Chinese grafting tool, I'm going to park the stainless steel one because I don't use that and I don't want to give you advice on how to use that because I'm not very good at it. So with the Chinese grafting tool, you want to come down completely parallel to the cell wall, and then you've got this flexible tip on the end, and the flexible tip will allow you to bend round the bottom of that cell and get down underneath the very small larva. And that is how you get the larva out and onto the grafting tool with the minimal amount of damage possible. And that is what it's all about. You need to pick the right age of larva, which is around 4 to 5 days, nothing older than that. You need to get that angle of approach correct, so coming in right down the sidewall, and then you need to scoop up underneath it, and then you need to get that larva from the cell into your queen cup with as minimal damage as possible. Now, if you can do that and you can line up a whole frame of larva on a grafting cell, then I reckon that's 95% of the difficulty of queen rearing out of the way. That is the difficult bit done. Then it's all about just following a sequence, putting your cell builder in place, giving them the right food, giving them the right flow, making them in the right state, so making them hopelessly queenless, making sure they have the correct proportion of nurse bees, all of the stuff that we've covered in previous videos and all of the stuff that we'll cover later on in this series as well. This is the difficult bit though. This is the bit that requires skill, and the only way that you can acquire this skill is by practicing. It's a really difficult skill. It's taken me years to get to the point where I'm thankful if I get 50% acceptance on a frame. So don't think, I can't do that, it's difficult, so I'm just going to do something else. I see a lot of people say, oh, I don't graft because it's too difficult, I go down with the Nikko kit route. And I've done that. It's just, it's not comparable. It's very, very difficult, and it comes with its own risks. Not to say that it doesn't work, but it's not really scalable in my opinion. And you risk, if you've got your best queen, you risk something happening to your best queen in the Nicot cage. So I'm really not a big fan of that system at all. I think grafting is one of the best skills you can learn as a beekeeper because it gives you the ability to select from your best colonies, breed them for future generations. So that's a little bit of background about grafting. I've tried to do a demonstration on this microscope and it is so, so difficult. And I'll tell you again why it's difficult, is that angle of approach, and this microscope at least shows you that. And what it is, is that when you have a frame of eggs— so we've got a frame of broodinal stages here. I'll show you some different stages of larva and eggs and different age larva because that's really useful, this microscope. But the problem is, is that when you're going into a frame like this, you want to be going in perpendicular to the frame. So perpendicular to the frame at 90 degrees and completely parallel to the cell walls. So obviously when I'm doing that underneath a microscope, all you can see is the back of the grafting tool. So I've tried to do it a couple of times coming in at an angle, and I'll put those videos up now and you can see roughly how it works, and you can see the age of the larva that I'm going for, but it does obscure the view a little bit. So I'll show you the video again here. I've set this one up. What this is good for is identifying the age of larva. So if you're going to get this microscope, fine, What you want to do is you want to identify day four ideally after they've hatched, and these are minuscule. These aren't the big fat chubby larvae that you see that are filling those cells. These are the ones that you barely can see them. It looks like a pool of royal jelly with a little speck in the middle, and that's what you're going for. You're going for that speck. Now my approach, I'll just talk you through it a little bit again with the Chinese grafting tool. I use a fresh grafting tool for every single batch. So if I'm doing a day worth of grafting, I'll go out, I'll get a separate grafting tool. At the end of the day, I get rid of it because it's not worth the damage that you do to the tool. It makes it difficult for next time. So I'm on a fresh grafting tool. I'll identify the correct size larva, and on a brood frame like this, you get lots and lots of goes, so you do tend to mess up a few of them. So what you want to do is you want to get your Chinese grafting tool if that's what you're going to use. Make sure that the reed is in a good condition. Make sure that the reed is nice and flat as well. And then you wanna come down at a 90-degree angle and you wanna push that down underneath the larva like that. Once you've got it out, you need to retreat back up with minimal damage as possible. Don't use the plunger yet. The plunger has nothing to do with this side of it. All you're doing is you've got a little reed, you're putting that down into the cell, Pulling out the tiny larva, pulling it out. Then at that point you want to take your queen cups. So then once you've got your larva on your grafting tool, what you do again is you go down 90 degrees to the actual cell cup and parallel to the wall. So you're coming down at the same angle like that, and you want the reed to bend, and as that reed bends You can use the plunger to very, very slightly and gradually just push that larva off until you get a full plunge. And then once you've got a full plunge, you take the tool away. Don't release when you're down there, because if you release, you're potentially going to stab that larva. So I'll just talk you through that again. I do appreciate this is very, very difficult to show you this, like, talking to you. So I've tried to do a few close-ups, and I'll put the close-ups up, but they're just not the best. So you've got the larva on your grafting tool with the reed extended. You want to put it down the wall, bend it round so the reed bends 90°, and then slowly and gradually push the bamboo plunger down. That's going to push that larva off. You'll see that it's off. Keep the plunger down and take it out, and then you can release and take that reed back. That's the method that I use. Other people have different views on it. That's the method that I use, and I get a really, really good acceptance rate now doing that. That bit, there isn't a huge amount of skill in it. The taking the larva out of the cells, there is a huge, huge amount of skill. Just takes practice. Just do it again and again and again. It doesn't matter if you're trying to rear 2 or 3 queens. Do a full frame. Do a full frame of 20 or 25. And you might get 2 or 3 that take. Try and think back at those ones and identify the ones that you think you did well and see if they're the ones that take. And you just keep on doing it, keep on doing it over and over again, and you'll get to the point where you actually get quite good at it and you get to the point where you don't even really think about it. You just choose the larva that you want. You do it without even looking because it's just a repeatable skill that you do. You can pretty much do it with your eyes closed because you can't really see in anyway. It's more identifying the larva of the right age, getting the angles right, getting a good hive tool that you're comfortable with, and then just following that process. So there you go. Hopefully you got enough from that video to show you how to graft larva. The microscope didn't work as well as I thought it was going to work, but it did give you an indication of what the larva should look like, how big they should be in relation to an egg, That angle that you should be going down and how to get that larva off your hive tool onto a little queen cup like that. Like I said, if you can master the art of grafting in terms of getting them from the brood frame and getting them into a queen cup, that is 95% of the way to getting to a point where you've got big, fat, chubby virgin queens that are going to go out and get mated. Now getting the queens mated is equally difficult, but I think you have a little bit of luck that comes into it there. So you need good mating weather, You need to do it at the right time of the year. So I hope you enjoyed that video. I hope you found it useful. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.
