Raise Your Own Mated Queens For FREE - Beekeeping On A Budget

If you want to raise your own queen bees, you have come to the right video. I'm going to show you every step in the process, from choosing the right larva, the right age, grafting them, setting up your starter finisher, taking your cells, setting up the mini mating nucs, taking them out for mating, and then that final quality assurance check at the end, the inspection of the mated queen. It all starts here with a really good, strong colony of bees. So let's have a quick look at what we've got. So frame of eggs, Capped brood, more capped brood, 12 frames of brood. The queen is in there. I'm putting a queen excluder on. So the first box is all set up. The second box is even simpler. All you need to do is go around your apiary and fill up another brood box with 12 frames of brood, preferably capped brood. No bees at all, no queen cells, nothing like that. Just 12 frames of capped brood. So then all you do is pretty simple, 12 over 12. So this is what it looks like now in a diagram form. That bottom brood box there, 12 frames of brood. And the queen is in there as well. I've then got a queen excluder sitting on top of it. And then above that queen excluder, I've got another box full to the brim with brood, but no bees whatsoever. You need to make sure that the colony that is below has enough bees to cover this top box here. Day 0 is complete. 12 frames of brood, queen excluder underneath, another 12 frames of brood, and the queen, and all of the bees. We need to wait now 10 days and come back and do the next step. We are back. Let's get going setting up this colony so we can graft some queens. So quick recap on where we are. We need to combine these 2 impulses, the swarming impulse and the emergency impulse. I've built up the emergency impulse by stocking that colony full to the brim with brood. What I need to do now is add in the emergency impulse into the mix, and the only way to do that is to take the queen or any queens that are in there away. That's what we're doing now. Let's jump straight into it. So the first indication here is very good. We've not triggered swarming even though we clearly congested the bees here. But when you're setting up queen rearing starters like this, you have to think about what you're trying to do and the status of the 2 boxes. This top box up here, we know there are no queens in there because all we put in there was capped frames of brood, and then the bees moved up from the bottom through that queen excluder. So bees and brood on the bottom one. In the middle, we've got a queen excluder. Up here, we placed The frame was of brood only, capped brood, and all of the bees came up through the queen excluder. What that means is we're confident we're not going to have any queens up in this top box. Now, the next few steps can be done in a variety of ways. This is the way that I do it. So the first thing I do is I take the top box. This is a queenless box with lots of swarm cells. I place it off over to one side. My next job is I want to go and find the queen in my bottom box. I check my queen excluder, and then I shake my queen excluder into the box that's got the queens. Not the box that's not got the queens. This one over here. And then I place the queen excluder on top, preserving its queenless status. Not hopelessly queenless, just queenless. Then I take the cage, previously prepared cage, and I go through this box here, and I'm looking for the queen. Now what some people do at this stage is they say, well, don't bother looking for the queen here because you're going to shake that through a queen excluder, you'll find any queens. But I just think if I can find her, which I probably can, and put her in a cage, she is an expensive breeder queen, this one, just by chance. I don't normally set up starter finishers on my breeder colonies, but I did in this instance here. So I don't want to shake my queen through. I want to find any known queens, and I want to use the shaker method that we'll cover later on in this video to ensure that there are no other queens present. Really important, that one. So get myself a little bit of space. Let's take this frame, place it off to one side. First thing we're going to do is find that queen. I'm not gonna lie, I was worried up until that point. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven frames in. I've still not found the queen, but this is the first time I've seen eggs. So, whoo! That was close. This is an expensive breeder queen. I don't think she's on this frame. I promise you I've not looked. She'll be on the next frame. Watch this. Look, she is here on this frame. So let me give you a close-up of this queen because she is stunning. So let's jump into it. I'm going to get my queen. I don't need any attendants in here. I'm just going to pick her up by the wing, place her in, get her in. There we go. So one queen bee in the cage. So we take the original We take the original brood box that had the queen and we place that off over to one side. We replace it with our top box here. Now, the reason we've replaced it with a top box, and this is the only box that is going to remain in situ here, because what we're adding in here is just capped brood. So let me go through these frames. I'll show you exactly what I'm doing and I'll show you what I'm seeing at the same time. I shake off every single frame as I do it. So first frame, I'm seeing no open brood whatsoever. Lots of capped brood, and maybe a few play cups on that side there. There's nothing on there that the bees can use to make a queen, so I can move on to the next frame. So shaking it all off. Good nectar coming in there. So I've just flashed through the frames there. They haven't built any swarm cells, which is really good for me. So we're in a really nice point now. We know that that bottom box is hopelessly queenless. If you were to graft into there, You'd get really, really good takes. But we want to use all of that top box resource as well, but without any of the risk that comes with adding in bees where you don't know if there's a queen in there or not. You do want to make sure, and that's why we do the shaker box next. So you just take another brood box, place it on top like that, and then all you do is all of the frames that are in the box that originally had the queen, you bring them up here and you shake them through the queen excluder. Lovely brood pattern. F1 Buckfast queens from Black Mountain Honey, if you're wondering. So you can see just the beginnings of swarm cells over here. I think they started and then they got put off by the weather. So then once you've shaken all the frames, give the box a tap, and then you know if any queens were in there, they're now in the shaker box. So let's have a look inside this shaker box here. You get the idea, there's a queen excluder at the bottom, there's tons of bees in there. And those bees want to go down and find the dark and find the brood. So you'll likely get to a point where a lot of the bees won't go down like that. So what I like to do at that point is just lift up the box and just give them one good thump. I can't see any queens, which generally means that this should work very well indeed. So a peek down under the veil, there are a lot of bees. Ow! So the rule of Black Mountain Honey is if I ever get stung, I have to leave it in. So there we go, I did get stung there. So What we have here is lots of capped brood, lots of nurse bees, a huge amount of bees in total. And what we have to do now is set them up perfectly and just give them the final few ingredients to make some queens. They need pollen for protein, they need sugar for carbohydrates, but most importantly, they need young larva to create those queen cells. Without the larva, we've got nothing. We go in there very shortly, but I like to set my colony up first before I go off and do the grafting. Really easy to set up now. I just need to go in there. It's hopelessly queenless. I'm just going to take off 2 frames that have nothing on it that I want. So if I've got loads of stores in there, I'll just take A frame of stores, and if I've got too much pollen, I'll take out a frame of pollen. I've gone through my apiary and found myself a really nice natural pollen frame, so I'm going to add that back in. And then the final space is for the grafts that we're going to do next. And then I want to find 2 frames. I'm going to shake the bees off, but 2 frames that I don't really need in here. Like I said, maybe a frame of stores, something like that would be good. So that one there, perfect example. You can see just a tiny little bit of brood on it, lots of stores, so that one can go. And then, yeah, as soon as I picked that one up, I knew that was going to be the one. So there we go, just a little bit of brood on that one as well and plenty of stores. So then what I like to do is go in the middle like this. So I just centralise things a little bit. I then take my pollen frame, something like that's good. Go for the best pollen frame that you've got. Yeah, that is what you want. And you want to put it in, but put the best pollen side facing the gap. So this is going to be your setup here. Loads of frames of bees, no queens at all. This frame here is my pollen frame. And I've got a frame gap in the middle, and that is for my grafting frame. Let's go over, do some grafting now. Just graft from the best colonies you've got. Today I'm grafting from the breeder queen that was in here. She is exceptional. Now choosing the grafting frame is probably the most important part of queen rearing in terms of the things that you really can control. You can control the maternal side to produce the virgin queens, and then the virgin queens will go out and mate with drones, and then that is the paternal side. So that's why we try to flood our apiaries with good drones, drones that we know will go out and give us the characteristics that we want. But on the maternal side, you can go out, you can buy yourself a breeder queen, you can get yourself an F1 queen, you can just choose the best queen in your apiary. Any of those are fine. The idea here is though that these larvae carry some traits that you want, and that is your ability to select. So choose the colony wisely, but also choose the frame wisely as well. You want it from a really nice, big, strong, healthy colony. You want to see all of the cells filled to the brim with royal jelly. You want the larvae at the correct size. The best way to think about it is you want a frame of eggs That have just hatched out and become larva. That is perfect. I'll show you inside this frame now, super close, and you'll see what I mean. See all this larva in frame here? All those big chubby ones that are filling it? Oh, they are so too old. You do not wanna graft anything like that. Even if I look over here, see some of the ones here? These are way too big to graft from as well. And this is where people make the mistakes, and this is where things go wrong, and this is where you don't get good queens. There we go. See that one right next to it? That is the size larva. That one there, right in the middle. And see how that's different in size from that one that's right in the middle there now, and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger as you go along. But that one there, just before it turns into capped brood, that is the larva that I'm going to get out, and that is the size that I'm going for. First thing I use is my JZ Beezy cup bar like that. These just pop in and pop out, and you can see it on that camera there, we've got a groove down the middle and then it is rebated at the end like that. Now all you do, you take the JZ Beezy cup, you push it in. If it doesn't stick, you twist it, Because it's not a perfect circle. And then you look, that is pretty much secure. So cell cup's in. So in terms of grafting, everyone has their favorite grafting tool, and this is my favorite grafting tool here. I love this one. I don't actually have to look into the cell to be able to take the larva out. You use what works for you. Any of them are absolutely fine, just practice on them. Let me show you what is going on. So I've got my grafting frame here, and then I've got my bar in front of it, and this Is literally all I do. I look at the frame like this and I say, right, I want to graft this larva here. So when I say I don't look, I genuinely mean I don't look. So I've just grafted there and I've got the larva out. So you can see the tip of that bamboo skewer has got a young larva on it. Absolutely tiny. So the way that I like to get them off is impossible to show. So I like to put the filament down like that and then slowly push it out and come out in one. That is pretty much perfect for the first go. If you can't see the larva there, I'll try and show you where it is. So if you look exactly in the middle, it is just up to say 1 o'clock on the clock. These are the size larva that you need to graft. Now I know that's difficult for people. It's difficult to grasp just how small the larva need to be. They need to be that small. Let me show you some of the larva that are the wrong size now. So there we go. That is a larva there that is too big. And you can see it's probably what, 2 or 3 times the size. That one there is no good. So there we go, a couple of misfires, but this whole barn now has got a larva inside it. And then all I do at this point is I take my grafting frame and I just pop this bar in. So straight away before I do anything else, I'm gonna put my grafts in. You don't wanna leave the grafts out in the wind. Get those grafts into the colony here. And at this point you can see just how packed that colony is and also the pretty much instant reaction to that grafting frame going in. And you need to place on a feeder like this. And then the final thing to add is about a liter, maybe a liter and a half 1 to 1 sugar syrup. And there we go, we're all set. It's into grafting mode. I like to use this setup here just as my starter, which means that I take my grafts out after 24 hours and I go and place them into a finisher and they finish them off. However, for the purpose of this video, I'm just going to run them in this setup here, use it as a starter finisher, and then about 48 hours before the queens are due to emerge, I'll take them out of this box here and we'll go and make up some mini mating nucs and get them ready for mating. All of that is going to be covered still in this video. We are not even halfway through. Very excited. This is what we do day in, day out at Black Mountain Honey, and it is without a doubt my favorite part of beekeeping. So it's been 48 hours since I did those grafts. I'm going to go back in now, see how many the bees took, and all I'm going to do is just remove any where the bees didn't take to them. So you can see the bees have taken down all the syrup, so we'll top that up again today. I keep the syrup going throughout the whole feeding process. So the first thing that you want to see when you're lifting this frame out is exactly what I'm feeling here. Look. At the clusters of bees that are sitting on this frame. So you can see there, I'm not really seeing any cups at all where they're not getting a little bit of attention from the bees. This is a very, very good sign. Okay, so hopefully you can see that every single one of those there has taken. If you're seeing that amount of wax, that is perfect. The ones that don't take are so obvious because the bees either just neglect them, clear them out, do nothing, or put the tiniest of wax bands on them. If they're not looking like that after 48 hours, then they're definitely going to be Duds. And we've got 13 queens here on the way to becoming beautiful F1 Buckfast queens from Black Mountain Honey. I am going to come back here 2 days before that queen is due to emerge, take out the nice ripe queen cells, place them into mini mating nucs. I'll show you how to put all the bees in the mini mating nucs as well, and then we'll set them up for going out into the apiary and mating. So we're on to day 14, and inside now we should have a frame of beautifully ripe queen cells. Be very careful with the queen cells still, they're delicate, they can drop, and if they drop you'll see a really super elongated cell, which is definitely not what we want. But first up, let's get in, see if the bees have capped over those cells, and see how they're coming along. A little puff of smoke, let's take a look and see what those cells are looking like. Right, there's something There's something a little bit strange going on here. But check out this cell here. There's something wrong with one of those cells. One of those cells there is destined to fail. So all of these cells look normal. This here is just a little bit of brace comb. Though for this bit here, we'll just cut it off. Get a knife in there, I'll cut that off. There is a cell here, there is another one there that's hidden. Both of those are perfectly viable. In fact, every single cell here is perfectly viable except this one here. When you see something like this, what's happened is the larva dropped Down to the bottom, so that one there will never emerge, but we will open it up and take a look and see what is inside. And then this is the cell here that is way too long. The larva has dropped down to this end, so if I kind of cut it in half, the larva should have been on that side and should have progressed into a pupa. We're just going to find it down that end, which is not where you want it. We can see it's fallen from the royal jelly, which means it is a dud. And if we just open up that cell there, you can see, not got anything useful in there at all. So got the majority of those bees off there now, and hopefully you can see just how nice these cells look. So with this wild little bit of comb here, all I'm going to do is just take the knife and just cut around. You can see, pretty easy to cut that there, so that cell's free. There is another cell on this one here as well, so I'm just going to be really careful just to try and cut away some of the wax that's on the end. And there we go. If you look at the end there, you can see I just got the Tip perfect amount of wax off there, and a queen will emerge from in here. So I've tidied up my cells here. I've removed the one that was super elongated, and another one had connected up. I've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. 11 very good cells. Day 14, and I can take these cells out now and I can harvest them. So let's show you how to make some mini mating nucs, and let's show you how to get these queen cells in. So this is what my mini mating nucs look like. So they're made of polystyrene. I paint them in lots of cool colors like this to help the bees come back. At the front we have an entrance that we can close and open to keep the bees in and out. When we're stocking that up, we obviously want to keep that closed. That reveals a mesh there, and this mesh here is very, very important when it comes to keeping the bees cool in here. They can overheat very quickly. We have a plastic crown board, a removable feeder section that I fill all the way to the top with fondant, and then we have 3 plastic frames that are fully coated with wax. Next most important part is putting that little yellow queen excluder in there because that will stop the queen getting through into the feed and stops them drawing comb in there. The next mistake that people make is they do this without a crown board and they do it without a properly modified crown board. So what you need is a plastic crown board and you need a crown board that can accept a cell or a cell protector through the hole and then some way of covering it up like that. It's really important to have this crown board, but it's even more important to have it the right way round. That's not the right way around. If you put your bees in there and then went to go put your cell in, it's in the wrong location. Whereas you can see now, correct orientation, I can put my cell in, in the gaps in the frames. So then the final thing that you need to do is get your roof and place the roof on and make sure that it is a very tight fit. Finally, you want to double-check that it is fully closed and the bees cannot escape. Now you've got to come up with a plan at this point as to how you're going to get your bees in that box. So when it comes to mini mating nucs, there's only one way to fill them in my opinion. And that is from the bottom. And then if you're scooping the bees, you just scoop them straight up, plop them in, close that exit. Or if you're going to use the resources behind you, this is how you do it. I've got my frame of grafts here. Put that off to one side. Do not shake your frame of grafts. Any other frame, you can just pick it up like that. We have got a crazy amount of bees there. I find it a lot easier just to shake a couple of frames in, blow the bees off the top, close them in, And that is a job well done. So you'll see all of those bees there, you just need to push them in. You don't need to do that many shakes when you've got that many bees on each frame. You just slide along the plastic there, all of those bees go in. And I would say 2 frames is enough. Take your smoke, smoke the bees a little bit, smoke them all away. Once you've got the majority of the bees away, you need to try and close this exit without killing any bees. So there we go, I've got all of the bees in here. I can feel that's a substantial haul of bees. Very important what you do next. Do not follow any other guidance. This is the way you do it. Take this home and place it somewhere very cool. You want to go for 7 or 8 degrees Celsius. So if you took this box and placed it here and opened it up, all of the bees would just go back to this hive. Do that anywhere within 3 miles of this apiary, all of the bees will just go back to the But even if you were to take this box now over 3 miles and go and place it in a new apiary, you'll open it up and all of the bees will fly out. You need to force them to stay, you really do. And the only way that I've found successfully forcing them to stay is to keep them locked up in really cool conditions overnight for 48 hours. So the next job that we've got is to get the queen cell into the mating nuc that's stocked with bees. And remember what I said, you always put the bees in from the bottom and you always put the crown board in the correct place, because when you get to this point, if you've not done that, You will struggle to get the queen cell in. So this here is a cell protector, and it is up to you whether you want to use a cell protector or not. Cell protector just means that the bees in this box cannot burrow into the cells from the side, and it means that the queen is almost certainly going to emerge if she is in a good condition. I recommend using a cell protector. So then all you have to do is take your frames out like that, get the bees off them, harvest your cell. Don't shake it at all. If there's bees on it like this, Blow them off. Then you take your cell like that and you place it into your cell protector. And then this is the bit where you're happy you've done all the prep because you take off your roof and then all you have to do is open up your flap and then place that cell protector down into the gap like that. And then we move it into that cold stasis for at least 24 hours, but preferably 48 if you can control the temperature well. This is what the inside of the box should look like now, full. So the brim with bees really packed in. We're going to pop that lid on and we're going to take them off to storage. So I've got my lids on, I've closed up all the entrances. I'm going to do this for all of the rest of the cells, pack up the 10 mini mating nucs and take them straight home, get them into some cold storage and leave them there for 48 hours. I've still got loads of bees in there. I've made up my mini mating nucs. I'm going to take them to the new apiary, but I don't want all of those resources to go to waste. You can use it to introduce a very expensive breeder queen. So here's our queen. Beautiful German buckfast. She is absolutely huge. But for this introduction here, immediately hopelessly queenless. I'm just going to take this queen, place her in between two brood frames like that. And if you want to follow the rest of the story with this German breeder queen at the end of the video, I'll stick a link up in the top right-hand corner. But for now, let's close everything up, get the mini mating nucs, take them back home, get them cool, and then get them ready for placing in the mating apiary for mating with hopefully some very good weather. So it's 9 o'clock at night now. I've got a box full of bees. I've got my ripe queen cell here inside. I'm gonna go and place it off, put it in the shade, and I'll be back here first thing in the morning to take it off to its new site. All I'm gonna do is just take the nuc box, place it down here, knowing that it's in shade now, but more importantly, it's gonna be in shade in the morning as well. So you can see the nuc tucked away there in the shade. They'll be very happy there until the morning. So I went up to the apiary at 4 o'clock this morning and tried to film it, and it was just way too dark. So I went and fetched the nuc, I brought it back home, I've taken my daughter to school, I've got myself a coffee. It's about 9 o'clock now. The bees are absolutely fine in here, and I'll show you it before I let them out. But now it is time to go and place them onto the ground. That's where I get my queens mated. I'll show you exactly how to do that now. So when it comes to placing the mating nucs down, literally all I do is I come down, place the nuc there with the entrance facing that way. The nuc next to it, I always like to have them together. When you put them together, you don't put them together like that, you put them together like that. And that gives you the very best opportunity of getting the queens to go back in the correct box. And I'll just show you it on there as well. That is the configuration that I place them on the floor. So once they're down on the floor, couldn't be easier. All you do is go in, open up the entrance like that, place it back down. I then leave it for 4 weeks. I do nothing. I don't come back to check to see whether the queen's come out. I know that the queen is going to come out because of the technique that I use. I don't come back to feed unless it is extreme weather because I've given them a lot of fondant there. I don't come back to see whether the virgin's starting to lay. I literally don't do anything. I come back 4 weeks later and it's either a success or it's a failure. So you can see the bees don't need a huge amount of encouragement to start coming out now. They're not flying out, they're coming out in a very ordered manner, which shows that they are not stressed. They're happy with where they're living, and you can see that we have successfully got those bees to stay in that Nuke. We now have to pray to the weather gods, which for 2025 in the UK could not have been any better. We want nice, stable, warm weather. We want a flow. We want 21 to 25 degrees. We want minimal wind and we just want continuous, nice, calm weather. As many mating opportunities as possible and flood the area with as many good drones from your colonies as you possibly can. This is something you need to set up weeks in advance, but I'll do a separate video showing you how to flood your apiary with the best drones. So the only thing left to do is to go into this one here that's been here for about 5 weeks. Let's see if we've got a queen. Let's see if We've got brood. Let's finish off this video and let's harvest a queen. So first thing I'm always looking for is, is it full of bees? If it's full of bees, we've got a chance we're going to have a mated queen in there. So this box here, as you can see, lots of bees still in there. Very, very happy with that. So I'd love to say that it's dead easy and every time you get successful matings, but unfortunately this one here isn't a successful mating. And there's a number of ways that I can tell that. So the first one is look at how the bees are clustering up around the feeder. That's not where they should be clustering up. They should be clustering up around the brood. I was expecting to see nice capped worker brood. Instead, there's not much going on. There's the odd egg here. Some of the eggs are sitting on pollen. They're not in the right place. They're not in a nice pattern. Something's up. And the most likely thing that's happened here is that the queen has failed to mate. We have had some poor weather in 2025, and this queen here has obviously just missed the opportunity to go out and make the most of that. The other thing that could have impacted this one here is the ants. Ants are a real problem, and when you're mating hives on the floor like this, You do have to put up with ants. Generally though, in the UK, they're not that much of a problem. And if you do have a problem with ants, it's very easy just to lift them up off the ground and put some traps in, and it will stop the ants completely. You can also use ant powder. Not a massive fan of ant powder, so I'm going to stick to the natural method of just trying to make sure that there's not too many ants in the area. So hopefully you can see the eggs there. You can see the eggs on pollen, which is never a good sign. The lack of bees, the lack of brood. Something not right. Plenty of bees on this side here. Wasn't an issue that there wasn't enough bees. Just probably didn't get the right weather for this one here, which is a shame. So I found the queen. She's just on the edge there. So that one didn't go too well. I'm going to put it back together. I've not lost hope completely on that one. I'll give it another couple of weeks. Now normally in the UK, I work with roughly a 50-55% success rate. So that means for the amount of mini mating nucs that I make and put those queens in, I get around 50 to 55% mated queens that I can sell at the end of it. Sounds quite low, doesn't it? But we are in North Wales and we'll be low as a percentage in the UK as well because we don't get that nice warm stable weather. However, 2025, we are up just below 90%. It's about 88% success rate, which is phenomenal. That really is. Wow. If we could do that every year, we could change our business completely. So next mini mating nuc along, I've taken a look at the entrance, looks really good. I'm confident we're going to have a queen in this one. So let's get inside and see what we can see. So a cell has emerged there. I much prefer what I'm seeing on these frames, and I can see already we've got some capped worker brood down there. So you can see there, bees working away. Now I'm not sure if you can see the difference between this versus the other frame. They just look to me like they're working a lot harder. They're not running around, they're not scared, they're not frightened, they're not timid. They have got purpose. So then this is exactly what you want to see. You want to see capped brood, you want to see a nice capped brood pattern. And then I like to see emergence of that brood and her going back round and laying again. If I'm seeing all of those things and the queen looks good and she's not damaged, she is ready for harvest. Wow, she is a beautiful queen. Very happy with her characteristic Black Mountain Honey black tip. I love that as well. She is stunning. And you'll see what I mean there about the black tip as well. She's just busy laying an egg, getting tended to. You can just tell when the pheromone's good. You can tell when they've been accepted. You can tell when they've been well mated. A lot of the time, It doesn't go well. But when you get results like this, you really do have to be happy. So then my next job is to mark her. I'm going to give her a pink mark because I'm using this queen for myself. So all I like to do, take your pen, so important this, give it a few pumps. You see all that paint that just came out? That will have killed your queen. Give it a pump, let that paint come out. Right, it's mixed up properly now. A couple of pumps, wipe off the excess, make sure there's no bubbles. I come in here with my queen, I pin her down from behind. I do. A perfect circle on her back. Gonna get it right this time. And then I let her go and she just goes out. And there we go, one marked queen. And there we go. This is our UK-mated F1 Buckfast queen. Beautiful pink marking. If you are interested in the very best quality, calm, UK-mated F1 Buckfast queens, hit the link below. Take a look at our website. Ask any questions you have. We're more than happy to send you these queens to help you improve your bees.