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Beginner Queen Rearing using the Joseph Clemens Starter/Finisher

163K views 224 replies 77 participants last post by  minister man 
#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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#199 ·
well im happy with this method now. checked on the cells and they are all twice as large as before and i have 22 out of 30 that are accepted and capped. Probably need to still work on my grafting i know a few were definitely my fault. Bee Beehive Honeybee Insect Apiary
I did my first frame swap for some new open and capped brood today as well.
 
#201 ·
This method confuses me.

1. Why do we use a 5 frame colony instead of a populous 10 frame colony?

The larger 10 frame colony would be able to turn out double the number of queen cells...why does the author insist on a 5 frame box? Why not use a 10 frame box and insert 2 or 3 queen cell frames????

2. Why not just let the colony finish capping the 2-3 queen cell frames, put them in mating nucs, and then rinse and repeat?

I really do not understand why they insist on using a 5 frame box.
 
#202 ·
This method confuses me.

1. Why do we use a 5 frame colony instead of a populous 10 frame colony?

The larger 10 frame colony would be able to turn out double the number of queen cells...why does the author insist on a 5 frame box? Why not use a 10 frame box and insert 2 or 3 queen cell frames????

2. Why not just let the colony finish capping the 2-3 queen cell frames, put them in mating nucs, and then rinse and repeat?

I really do not understand why they insist on using a 5 frame box.
All about the resources you can bring into the queen rearing equation... This method uses less..
 
#207 ·
I've modified this method a little bit. But as long as you can keep the colony queenless (which I have struggles with on occasion because I'll skip checking for cells as thoroughly as I should) it just works so well for me. Now, I'm not claiming I have the best cells or the highest quality queens, but there is always jelly leftover when I'm on my game keeping everything in good shape. But they're leaps and bounds better than anything I've bought over the years. I usually run this in a 5 over 5 nuc initially and then build up to four boxes high (with feeder in one box). A few pics of my successes with this over the last year (and one queen from a couple years ago who was still going strong this spring).

64450


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This is a typical virgin:
64454
 
#209 ·
I've been grafting less often. Less often enough that I can let a queen emerge, mate, and lay up for a bit. It happened by accident once this year and by design a second time. And it's been good for them. Usually I add brood when I pull cells to help keep LWs at bay and also give them boost down the line. So no great answer to that question. But they don't go more than a couple weeks without some influx of brood to care for/reinforcements. This last batch I left a cell behind for them and then she should take them through the winter then. But I still have a number of cells left over. I think I'm going to go split them a couple more ways and drop cells (or maybe queens as I have a glut of them too).
 
#211 ·
It is easy to let queen rearing get away with you and wind up with too many small colonies tying up all your equipment plus perhaps compromising your honey producers that you have borrowed a few frames from here and there. It would seem that more queens laying should give faster population growth but I think reality is something else.
 
#217 ·
Hopefully, it's cool to respond to this sticky, but it's been here a while. I had a couple of questions about the OP's somewhat longer website article.

Joseph uses a deep hive body with medium frames, and I’ve been using a medium hive body with a slatted rack under it.
This stuck out at me because I will be using mediums, but why a slatted rack, or why mediums in a deep box? Not sure what that's accomplishing.

Note – if you use a modified self spacing Hoffman style frame like the one in the picture after your cells are built and capped the bees will almost always build lots of burr comb on and around your cells, and nothing that you do will make much of a difference. It’s not a disaster – your cells will be fine, you just want to carefully pick the wax away from the tip of the cell so that the queen can get out. But who needs that? The cure is to make a narrow frame (5/8″ – 3/4″) to hold your cells.
This one doesn't make sense to me at all. I thought the Hoffman frames were intended to keep bee space. How does that violate it and a 3/4" wide frame keep it?
 
#221 ·
This stuck out at me because I will be using mediums, but why a slatted rack, or why mediums in a deep box? Not sure what that's accomplishing.
More bees , more bees and more bees, bees hanging on the outside. so for you just use 2 mediums, or a feeding rim under the medium, for more bee space.

This one doesn't make sense to me at all. I thought the Hoffman frames were intended to keep bee space. How does that violate it and a 3/4" wide frame keep it?

At some width,, comb is built, the more narrow will take more time, and the wider will take less time, recall above" lots of bees" you really only need the width of a Queen cell + a bee space on each side toward the next comb. IE you do not want a comb there, just finished cells.

GG
 
#218 ·
Grafted queen cells are usually placed in a single row. A regular comb has cells on two sides and both horizontal. The grafting frames of cells if placed on the standard 1 3/8 c. to c. creates excess space. Narrower side bars on the cell frame allow you to slide adjacenet frames up tight to the cells. The cells get less burr comb which sometimes totally incorporates the cells into one mass. You will want each one separate to introduce individually.

The mediums in a deep box gives you options of using deep frames of resources as well as mediums.
 
#220 ·
I see that this post got resurrected again in 2019, and has been ongoing until about 4 months ago. I see that those who have questions about the scheduling may not have quite absorbed my posts #116, #125, and #128 from 2017 back on pages 6 and 7

In post #128, I gave 2 schedules. The first was for the first year, the second was for after your apiary had grown and you'd want to run 2 Queen Cell Builders, and perhaps a slightly less intense schedule, perhaps a bit easier to coordinate and get everything done.

Again, I built 2 special Queen cell Builder boxes specifically for this system, 12 inches tall, 6-framers, ventilated with window screen on the bottom 3 inches.

I also built the equivalent of 40 nucleus boxes - mine were actually only twenty 10-frame standard U.S. Langstroth boxes with 3 slots for hive partitions inside. They could be used as a single 10-framer, 2 x 5-frame nuc's with one partition in the middle slot, or 3 x 3-frame mating nuc's with 2 partitions in the outside slots. These did each require three 1/3 wide inner covers, two 1/2 wide inner covers, and one 10-frame inner cover, plus special floors that accepted the hive partitions. All my 10-framers were made this way.

Probably easier to just make up the nuc' boxes.
 
#224 ·
Yes Olododo, you can use a topbar hive to make grafted queen cells. You will need to make a custom bar as I did to fit the shape of your hive. You might also need the follower board to push the bees into just a section of the hive to feel crowded. However, I found I can take a robust colony with old comb, steal their queen in the morning, add grafted larvae in the afternoon and they will make about 10 beautiful cells. You do still need to check the bars for rouge cell (which is why all the grafts don't get built) but it works fine for me to have this system going for the small amount of cells I want at a time. I rehang the queen in a cage with candy after 48 hrs post graft and let the hive chew her out in about 3 days. That coincides with the day the cells are capped and I move them to my incubator for safe keeping, otherwise you need to leave it queenless until the cells are mature and removed to their splits.

You can also skip the grafting part and just insert a new empty bar into the brood nest 5 days before you plan to pull the queen. This gives them nice fresh comb to rework into queen cells and you will get some beautiful fat cells, as the bees will preferentially pick the new comb over the old dark stuff. With this, you have to cut out the cells off the wax to place into splits, but I did this for a number of years before I started grafting and using the roller cages.
Beehive Pollinator Apiary Insect Beekeeper
 
#225 ·
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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