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Beginner Queen Rearing using the Joseph Clemens Starter/Finisher

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#1 ·
I’m a beginner. This has been my second year raising queens – my third year keeping honey bees. So I am in no way pretending to be any kind of an expert. But Joseph Clemens has generously agreed for me to share some of my experiences using his method of queen rearing.

For anyone who is interested this thread starter is based on a broader post about my experiences as a beginner at queen rearing.

The Joseph Clemens Starter/Finisher System

The system that I’ve been using is what I call the Joseph Clemens System – because that is where I heard about it from, and because Joseph Clemens has proven that it works by producing very large, high quality cells and queens using this system. I have found that it is very well suited for me to produce a fair number of queens while learning skills that can be scaled up to higher production later if desired. It’s fun, affordable, and you can use it even if you only have a few hives.

This system uses a queenless five frame nucleus with 4 medium frames of bees and a cell bar as a combined Starter/Finisher and produces 10-20 cells (more or less) at a time – and it can be used all season without having to be rebuilt. As you can imagine this is much more manageable for hobbyists than the way the commercial guys do it.

You can use this system over and over throughout the season without having to repopulate the starter/finisher hives, and you can use it just about any time that you want without having to do a lot of prep work – once you get it going . This system also avoids the problem of having to manage a cell builder hive that is on the verge of swarming by being Queenless – no matter how strong it is, a hive won’t swarm without a queen. When I first read about it, I thought that it sounded like such a hive would develop laying workers or some other problem because of being queenless for an indefinite time. But, because you give it fresh brood about once a week none of those problems crop up – it just gets really strong and stays that way all season long. It really does.


One of my best batch of cells using this method. I’m still learning, but next year these will be my “regular” sized cells instead of just the best ones. I hope.



This is the setup I started the season with – the top box houses a quart jar feeder. Before long I realized that the small entrance (with a piece of excluder over it) through the slatted rack was too small for such a populous hive, and that the ventilation was not adequate.



So, I changed to this setup – from the bottom – Screened bottom board, queen excluder, 5 frame medium hive body plus the same inner cover, feed shim, and tele cover as in the previous picture.

Setting up the Cell Builder Hive

The two outer frames are capped/emerging brood, the next two contain stores – honey and pollen, maybe some empty space for them to draw comb and store incoming food. The center position is where you will be putting your cell bar after you graft.

You want this hive to be very populous, so shake in lots of nurse bees. After the initial setup the cell builder will stay strong – even get stronger – from the frames of brood that you swap in every week.

Once a week (more or less) when you are working your other hives swap in a fresh frame of capped/emerging brood. The open brood on those frames along with the grafts and other open brood that you add to the cell builder keep it strong and stable. When you swap in new brood, you also have to check for queen cells in the starter/finisher, and on any frames that you take out – you will find wild cells pretty much every time. But since it’s only a 5 frame hive, and it doesn’t have a queen you can shake the bees off, and thoroughly inspect every frame in just a few minutes. Usually there is no need to even look at every frame – 2 of them will be pollen/honey, and one will be the cell bar. It’s pretty quick and easy maintenance, but it does have to be done at least once a week while the hive is being used.

How I (and you can ) Finally produce Big Cells

I tried fruitlessly almost all of this year to produce big cells like Josephs. I packed my cell builder with bees which I fed copiously, I tried double grafting, priming with royal jelly, placing fewer grafts – but no matter how hard I tried my best cells were “OK” at best (did get some nice queens though) – until I found this tip by Ray Marler: 4 days before you graft put a frame of hatching eggs/young open larva in the cell builder. That will insure that your nurse bees get into feeding mode by the time you add your grafts. My experience is that if I skip this step I get much smaller cells. Joseph Clemens produces nice big cells without this step, I think because he is continuously using his cell builder – so the bees stay in feeding/nurse bee mode – while I was only adding grafts to my cell builder every week or two.

When you swap in the cell bar with grafts on it there will almost certainly be queen cells started on the “primer” frame of open brood - At that time also check the other frames for queen cells. If you ever let one emerge it will ruin any cells that are currently in the hive – and you might have a hard time finding a virgin lose in such a crowded hive.

I feed my cell builder hive continuously – 1 to 1 sugar syrup from an inverted quart jar, and under the jar lid…



…Pollen substitute. I just spoon it in through the hole, and cover it with the jar lid. This is 8% protein mega bee mix with enough syrup to make a paste that is thick enough to not fall through the frames. The bees love it.

I hope this is helpful to anyone thinking about trying queen rearing.
 
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#160 ·
I'll take a look at them tomarrow....
Thanks for the advice ALL, and it sounds like even though they might build them out, they could still be duds--just because--Thanks for the extra info on that JW, I appreciate it.
My problem is that I only have silly Italians in my back yard to graft from, and my favorite hives are building up 20 miles down the road and I'll have to plan my trip so I can bring home another frame to graft from....and the lucky Italians will get the grafting frame when I'm done....I started out 4 queens in my back yard with the left over bees from packages I installed a week ago...They also adopted the fly-aways from the starter/finisher I started last week. They are building up if they want to or not :eek:

==McBee7==
 
#161 ·
Well I re-grafted today.
The new grafts are definitely smaller and less meaty, -- but they still taste good ;)
They had drawn out 2 of the 10 celle I grafted earlier (the meaty ones) and the 2 were full of RJ and the grubs had grown a LOT in just a couple of days, I also added more bees to the cell builder and donated the grafting frame to the new nucs in the back yard . Will give these grafts a few days and see what they think of them..

==McBee7==
 
#162 ·
I've read this thread a few times over the winter, a lot of the concepts behind using a nuc and replenishing it weekly with a frame of brood seem to 'make sense', but, the proof is always in the pudding. In years gone past, I've used a double deep with cloak board to raise a few queens. At this time of year with the early flow running hard, it gets to be a lot of work because that hive needs two honey supers, so every time I go to do something with / about cells, I have to lift heavy supers off, then put em back on when I'm done. The appeal of this system using a smaller box for me was in the reduced work. But I was skeptical about how well the bees would build and feed the cells.

I am set up to do half a dozen queens per round, the limiting factor for me is the number of mating nucs I've got to work with. Half a dozen queens every two weeks meets my needs, and will leave me with a small surplus of queens. When I set the builder up the first time, two deep frames of capped brood, two good frames of pollen and nectar, and I shook in nurse bees off of 6 more brood frames from a total of 3 different colonies. I left them to settle for a couple hours, then grafted 15 cups on one bar and placed the cell frame into the center of the new builder. First graft of the season, light wasn't the greatest and my hands were a bit shakey, so the graft wasn't the greatest. Check 24 hours later, they had 6 cells nicely built up with jelly. I'm happy, I wanted 6 cells, I had one deep split into 4 compartments of half size frames, and two 4 frame deeps to use as mating nucs. I planted those cells when they were ready. My 'bee schedule' is to do the majority of my work on Saturday each week, so I've been adding a frame of capped brood every Saturday.

For my second round, I started on Monday by putting in a frame of young brood just emerging from eggs to get the bees back into 'feeding' mode. I grafted the day before yesterday, on Wednesday, which will result in cells ready to transfer on Saturday the 17th, so my 'lotsa bee work' day falls on Saturday. Wednesday around noon I took out the brood frame and brushed all the bees back into the colony, then a couple hours later grafted 15 cups on one bar which went into the builder box. I went out today (Friday) and took a look to see how it turned out so far, this is what I found:-



Twice as many cells as I am prepared to deal with, and with the exception of one, those cups are FULL of jelly. I know a lot of folks are concerned about the cell size, but, one thing I've learned by reading here and listening carefully to those with a lot more experience, a well fed queen will be a good queen. I'm far more interested in 'how much jelly in the cups' than I am in 'how big are the cells'. I have no doubt that the queens coming out of these cells will be well fed, there isn't room for more jelly in most of those cups.

When I did the first batch, I did put syrup on for them, and some pollen supplement, I had just made up the nuc so no foragers oriented and foraging for this box. For the second round, they have lots of bees coming and going with pollen and nectar, the frames where brood is emerging are promptly getting filled with stores. I did put on a batch of supplement for this round as well, but didn't give them syrup. I'm using a really complex recipe to mix up supplement for the builder. 1 cup of sugar with 2/3 cup of warm water to make a syrup, then add bee-pro until the mix is roughly the consistency of peanut butter. It's still very wet, but wont run down the frames when I put it on top. The bees are all over it when I open the lid. I use wax paper to make a long skinny patty with that stuff that can sit on the two frames one side of the cells, and runs from end to end, so there is LOTS of feed real close to the cells.

The first batch are in the mating nucs, should be seeing eggs there any day now. Going to be interesting to see how this turns out, so far, it's looking pretty good.
 
#164 ·
Grozzie, I am for the "cup" full of jelly at the time of capping. So far I haven't noticed any of the ones that are full be "empty" when they pupate. The ones that aren't quite full seem "low" when done, but there is still some sort of residue. As long as there is jelly left over, I don't know how they could be malnourished. Unless there's some mechanism that I'm not understanding. I need to get better at adding brood to my cell builder. Open brood in particular. After two rounds they seem to go laying worker right after the second round is capped. So I need to remedy that... I usually tear down the builder and make it into mating nucs, I've had good luck with LWer colonies taking cells or honeywater dipped virgins pretty darn well. But this year I want to have them continuously make cells for me. So I need to master keeping it strong. When I graft Thursday I might make my first foray into a queen right finisher... which in theory would help prevent the LWers. Or I might just shuffle a frame of open brood into the starter/finisher on Friday and then put another one or two in on the day they cap them.

Good looking queen, wwfoste!

I lost my last batch to LWers "turning back on" or something... they started cells when I checked a day after grafting. Let them be until the day I usually pull them and they were all torn down (no virgin, just LWers). So I broke them up and used the last couple cells I had. Then made up a builder and grafted last week. That opps (and not checking every couple of days) kind of set me back some. I could see wanting to run two of them "just in case".

Anyway... here's a pic of my best batch so far this year, I think there were two misses and two "duds" in that batch:
 
#167 ·
I dont think my setup is missing any age of bee at this point. It was set up on May 22 with two frames of capped and lots of bees off of brood frames, then had capped brood added on May 28, June 3, prior to the photo above. I'm pretty sure they are making wax in there, the frame of capped I added on May 28 was a medium frame (it was convenient from a colony on the next stand), and they have drawn wax below the medium to deep depth. But even that new comb looks the color of older wax, probably because it's heavily travelled by bees headed up and down, it doesn't look like the clean new wax we see in honey supers on the other colonies in the same yard.
 
#168 ·
Thanks grozzie2.
I really had been thinking of it from the other direction. i have had webbing before, took that as just the bees, after seeing the pictures it dawned on me that by using the bees from new frames being drawn out I may have been the cause. Might be less webbing had I had been using old frames with young brood as a source. Method variance not a genetic variance.
 
#169 ·
I set my cell builder up last saturday the 17th. not going for a big run of queens, want to try for 30 queens te leftover to the bee club here. Yep, I'm a bit late this season,
but I want these ladies for the 20+ nucs I built these last few weeks. Plus, I've finally gotten enough drawn combs, and have the resources going.
When it was first populated it was overflowing with bees, seems a bit quiet, but it's full inside,

View attachment 34030


I went in and did a QC check and today there is nothing but closed brood.
I'm setting the open brood in tomorrow to start the feeding response, and going to graft on the morning of the 27th.

My goal is to requeen, and then make some nucs for next season.
Then make bees, and queens like Michael Palmer teaches one to do in his lectures.
 
#174 ·
What's the reasoning for leaving the cb queenless for 10 days?
Why do we do it this way for the nuc cb?
Tying to see the logic to this methods length of time for queenlessness.
I see many others using their cb's within 48hrs or less.

I'm def following the method we have here, just would like a little clarification.
Not finding any answers for this online here or other places.
 
#175 ·
What's the reasoning for leaving the cb queenless for 10 days?
Why do we do it this way for the nuc cb?
Tying to see the logic to this methods length of time for queenlessness.
I see many others using their cb's within 48hrs or less.
Does someone really say that somewhere?
You are absolutely right, there is no what so ever reason to leave the cell builder queenless for 10 days.


All the needed nursing bees have changed into older bees in 10 days.
 
#177 ·
this sucks, I didn't check the cb last week, and I have a laying queen inside my cb I just found out.
friggin tight layer but wtf...she's daughter of a Michael Palmer queen.
Guess I'll try again making another cb starting tomorrow.
I thought I searched for a queen better, then not seeing any swarm cells etc

I guess I have a brood factory now, this bomb is gonna bust...
I guess I'll move a frame to my slow hive
 
#179 ·
I have left the cell builder without a queen for the 10 days after grafting and then used the frames and bees to make the mating nucs. There was no problem with the brood being fed when the new queen started to lay, the older bee's brood food glans were able to produce the food that was needed.
 
#181 ·
I have left the cell builder without a queen for the 10 days after grafting and then used the frames and bees to make the mating nucs
Wow wow wow, we are now talking, or at least I understood so, how long CB should be queenless before grafting.


After grafting it is minimum 5 days queenless, if the cells are covered.
If not 10 days, then they are removed from CB to mating nucs.
 
#183 ·
Maybe the original thread is missing a step??....if this is a cell starter/finisher in same box, when are the cells pulled?? You stated that Joe Clemens is putting in a new graft continuously...every 4 to 5 days but you were doing it once a week....but that can't be the case if this is also a finisher...the timing doesn't add up.....maybe I missed a step??
 
#184 ·
For anyone who is interested this thread starter is based on a broader post about my experiences as a beginner at queen rearing.

Above is the third line of the first post; it has a hot link to an expanded explanation with pictures and a more detailed calendar.
 
#187 ·
4 days before you graft put a frame of hatching eggs/young open larva in the cell builder. That will insure that your nurse bees get into feeding mode by the time you add your grafts. My experience is that if I skip this step I get much smaller cells. Joseph Clemens produces nice big cells without this step, I think because he is continuously using his cell builder – so the bees stay in feeding/nurse bee mode – while I was only adding grafts to my cell builder every week or two.
Saw it yesterday , can't find it today. The only thing you are missing is the little snippet that says two nucs for 4-5 days.
The above quote is where I am scratching my head...he said he didn't use his box as much as Clemens......he said he put grafts in every week or two while Clemens used it more often which is why Clemens cells were bigger......this statement did not add up......if you are using the nucs as a finisher for 10 days, then that's the minimum you can swap in grafts....


Don't get me wrong.....I think this is a great approach....I just want to have every bit of information before even attempting this style.
 
#188 ·
.if you are using the nucs as a finisher for 10 days, then that's the minimum you can swap in grafts....
No, that is not correct. Using my own schedule as an example. we graft weekly here during queen season. Schedule goes like this. At the start, we graft on Wednesday and place cells in the builder. The following Wednesday, another graft goes into the same builder, so now two grafts a week apart are in there. On Saturday, the first set of cells is removed and spotted into mating nucs. The builder will only ever have one set of open cells that need feeding as a batch placed on Wednesday are due for capping the following Monday. Thru the season I graft on Wednesday, place cells into mating nucs on Saturday. From Wednesday thru Saturday there are always 2 sets of grafts in my builder arrangment.

In my own case, I'm only doing 1 bar of cells for each round, so I can actually have both graft sets in the same cell frame. But others doing larger quantities along this line will have two full cell frames in the builder at the same time.
 
#192 ·
Got my first package 2 months ago and now have a few queen cells in a CB (via Nicot and emergency cells). It is June 20 and my colony seems to be doing well. What are your thoughts on expanding my bee empire? I was thinking of starting 2 nucs (5 frame deeps) in addition to the 10 frame original. Is that asking to much of the bees? Too close to winter (California coast, so relatively mild)?

Also, does size matter? Your queens’ genes are the same whether she is large or small. Has it been shown that smaller QCs make poorer layers or are we speculating?

Thanks all for your contributions!
 
#193 ·
Well after reading from beginning to end I tried this method after 2 attempts at a closed cell starter produced 2 cell starts from about 60 grafts.

Happy to say checked today and I'm at least 75% started now. I think the practice of grafting has helped me improve as well and finding a more flexible chinese tool ( 1 out of 10) on amazon. My tool from mannlake was just digging into cell bottoms too much, and im struggling with the jzbz tool.

Thanks so far.
 
#198 ·
My tool from mannlake was just digging into cell bottoms too much, and im struggling with the jzbz tool.
Always graft from the darkest, blackest, oldest, brood comb with suitable larvae otherwise the chinese grafting tool may not 'turn the corner' at the bottom of the cell and will just penetrate the wax. You can stick such a comb into your breeder queen box 5-6 days before grafting - the bees will clean it, she'll lay it up, and you'll have a load of nice larvae - unless the bees fill it with nectar...
 
#194 ·
I used a piece of fine grit sandpaper to thin the reed on my Chinese grafting tool. Much more flexible now. Wrecked the first one by sanding it too much, so check every couple of swipes.
 
#197 ·
Just sticking my oar in on this thread to say a few things - firstly, imo it's one of the most valuable threads on the forum and I'm surprised that it hasn't yet been made a 'sticky'.

Secondly, for anyone who is rubbish at grafting (like me) and only needs a few queen-cells from time to time - it's not compulsory to donate larvae in the form of grafts - other methods can be used: such as inserting whole frames of suitable larva. Then, after you've cut the q/cells out, leave that frame in place to provide additional 'top-up' nurse bees.
Should you want to try the Hopkins method, then arrange for that frame to be held horizontally above the rest. Miller method, Ally method - they can all be used with the JC Queenless Starter-Finisher.

Lastly, I've used this 5-frame system very successfully for some years now, but this year I've been running it within a full-sized box, and initially dummied the box down to 5 frames. Then, as demands varied over the season I've been able to enlarge the space available to 6 or even 7 frames - so I guess an 8-frame box would be optimum.
LJ
 
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