In this tutorial, the presenter explains queen banking—a method for temporarily storing mated queen bees in optimal condition for commercial beekeeping operations. The video clarifies common misconceptions that queen banking involves long‑term storage of hundreds of queens, which leads to poor quality. Instead, it outlines a short‑term system used by Melitta Bees, where queens are kept for 1–5 days before shipment. The process uses JZ Beezy queen cages impregnated with synthetic queen pheromone, which are superior to standard shipping cages for banking. A dedicated colony (the queen bank) is set up with four frames: one pollen/food frame and three frames of capped brood loaded with young nurse bees (up to 1 kg initially, then 700–800 g added weekly). Queens are placed in the nuc, and the nurse bees feed them royal jelly, maintaining their health. The system naturally culls the weakest queens, improving overall quality. The presenter recommends not exceeding five days in the bank to ensure queens are in “tip‑top” condition when removed for distribution.
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Today I'm going to show you how to build your very own queen bank. Now, queen banking is a process, a super simple process, that means that you can keep mated queens in good condition for a very long period of time. Queen banking gets a bad name though, because people perceive it to be you're putting in hundreds of mated queens and leaving them there for months and then trying to take them out and sell them. Doing that, that is not proper queen banking, and doing that you'll end up with really poor quality queens. However, queen banking has a really useful purpose for commercial beekeepers. Commercial queen rearing operations like Melitta Bees, because it gives you the ability to do something like this. Imagine they go out every single day and harvest 200 queens. So Monday, go and harvest 200 queens. Tuesday, go and harvest 200 queens. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And then on Saturday, they send those queens— so they send off 1,000 queens to wherever they're going in the world. You need a system in place in order to do something with those queens that you collect on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. To make sure that they're in the very best condition for when you go to send them. Now, you could just take those queens in shipping cages and put them in an incubator and give the bees a little spray of water, but that doesn't keep the queens in optimum condition. Gives them the right temperatures and everything, but they're not getting what they need, which is nice copious amounts of royal jelly fed to them by young bees. A queen bank simulates that system there and ensures that when you take the queens out of the queen bank, they are in pristine condition. pristine condition. That is the exact system that they use here at Melitta Bees. They go out, harvest their queens every day, bring them back, put them into the queen bank. They stay in there for, depending on whether it's a Monday queen or a Friday queen, between 1 to 5 days, and then they get sent. In this video, I'm going to show you how to set up your very own queen bank that I recommend you use for mated queens if you need to use it. It's a super simple process but a very effective one. And one that is really useful when it comes to keeping queens for a short period of time. Let's see how we set it up now. So whilst Amano is setting up the queen bank in the colony behind me there, I'll show you all of the steps, don't worry about that. First thing we wanna talk about is cages. So that cage there, that's a JZ Beezy cage. The plastic of the cage is actually impregnated with the kind of like a fake queen pheromone. Really, really useful for banking. So if you're doing any sort of queen banking, do you need to use JZ Beezy? Cell cages like this, or queen cages I should say, and not the shipping cages that queens will come in. Shipping cages are designed for shipping, keeping the bees in optimum condition whilst they're being transported. Whilst you can ship queens in JZ Beezy cages, they come into their own when it comes to actually banking the queens. So this here is a full bar of mated queens, and they've been placed into a JZ Beezy cell holder, and then they're in the JZ Beezy cages. So if you count them all down, you can actually get 50 queen cages on a single bar like this. And then the setup of the colony couldn't be any easier. 4 frames. First frame is gonna be pollen and food. So choose your very best pollen and brood frame. The other 3 frames are just gonna be capped brood with lots of young bees. And then if the colony needs it, they dump in up to a kilo of young nurse bees to get the queen bank started. And then every week they add in another between 700 and 800 grams of young nurse bees. Just keep on adding the young nurse bees in and that keeps the queen bank full. Mano just said something really important there as well, which was it's a really nice safe system to kind of get rid of any of the poor quality queens. So if you put, say, 100 queens in a queen bank, they don't feed the kind of worst 1 or 2% because they want to feed the best 98%, and then those queens starve. So you get a few queens that will die in the queen bank, but it's always the worst queens that die. So you're kind of like upping the quality up a little bit, which is actually a really nice feature of a queen bank. So Armando's got 4 frames in there at the moment. Let's take a look at that pollen and honey frame. You see, very full up. So prerequisite there, just full to the brim with bees. Like you couldn't get any more bees on that frame. And then if you can just see underneath, if I just kind of go like that and try and get some of them to move a little bit, you can see it is full to the brim with pollen and lots of nectar as well. So choose your very best pollen frame and then it will all be good. The remaining frames in there are just frames of capped brood and you want to take your very best frames. of capped brood, as much capped brood as you can possibly get. So Amano has got the extra bees that we used for making up the mini mating nucs, and we're going to use that now to stock this queen back. So he's gone out, he's collected all of those bees, collected them from the super, which is the best place to collect it from because it means you get nice young bees. And then he is just going to dump all of those bees in. You see the water just means that they slide off in like that, and you have a very, very overpopulated colony of bees, which is exactly what you want. So then the next step, very simple, you just take your queens in their JZ Beezy cages like that and you place them inside the nuc, and all of those young nurse bees will be so, so desperate to get in there, check out the queen's pheromone, and to feed all of those queens, and they will keep them very, very happy indeed. And that's it, it's as simple as that. Every week now you just go back to the bank, take out the queens that you need, Add in another 700 to 800 grams of the youngest nurse bees that you can go and just collect from your supers, and you can keep that queen bank going pretty much indefinitely. But my recommendation, Melitta Bees' recommendation, don't keep your bees in there, your queens in there for any more than 5 days, and you will find when those queens come out of the bank, they will be in tip-top condition.
