How do I rear and mate my own queens?
Graft twelve-to-twenty-four-hour larvae into cell cups, give them to a strong queenless starter, then finish the cells in a queenright colony. Move sealed cells to mating nucs on day ten, before they emerge. A virgin mates on the wing with a dozen or more drones and starts laying about two weeks after emerging.
Step by step
- Grafting tool
- Cell cups and bar frame
- Starter colony
- Finisher colony
- Mating nucs
- Choose the breeder colony on traits you have actually measured across seasons — mite counts, overwintering, temperament — not on one good year.
- Graft larvae under 24 hours old into cell cups. Older larvae make smaller queens with fewer ovarioles.
- Give the bar of cups to a strong, well-fed, queenless starter colony to get them accepted.
- Move the accepted cells into a queenright finisher colony to be fed and capped.
- Transfer the sealed cells to mating nucs on day ten, before the first virgin emerges and destroys the rest.
- Leave the mating nucs undisturbed. Check for eggs about two weeks after emergence — opening them earlier can cause the virgin to be lost on her mating flight.
The full lesson
To rear high-quality queen bees, the most suitable one-day-old larvae are gently transferred from worker cells into queen cups using a grafting tool. Grafted larvae are introduced into queenless starter colonies packed with young nurse bees to ensure they are heavily fed with royal jelly.
Once they emerge from their cells, virgin queens are placed into miniature mating nukes with just a few hundred workers to prepare for flight. After successfully returning from her mating flight and starting to lay eggs, the queen is marked on her thorax with the International Color of the Year.
For controlled breeding, semen collected from select drones is micro-injected into the queen under a microscope in a laboratory environment. To prevent workers from attacking her, a new queen must be introduced to a queenless colony inside a special cage blocked with candy.
This lesson is also in the app, along with the other twenty-nine.
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1:36Lessons and forum answers describe beekeeping practice and peer experience, not veterinary guidance. Treatment thresholds, inspection timing and disease management vary by climate, subspecies and local regulation. Diseases that are notifiable where you live must be reported to your national bee inspectorate.