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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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#120 ·




Hoping for good luck on this first round. Like last year, though, it looks like they might end up mating at the same time as the ones grafted a week later do. May 1st is the first date for possible mating for the first round. The take on the bottom bar is awful because it got dropped into the grass and dirt and a bunch fell off. So 29 of 38 took (not all pictured). I don't think there was a miss on the top bar though... dropping them didn't do them favors. I did a 24 hour pic and it looked like 100% acceptance, but I didn't look too closely.
 
#122 · (Edited)
Simple no extra gear queen rearing system which can be used all summer in the same colony.

1. Divide a very strong two story colony, which has brood in both boxes
2. Find the queen and put her with the frame she is walking in the upper box. Destroy all queen cells.
3. Shake nurse bees from 4 frames of open brood to the lower box.
4. In the lower box remove one frame (capped extra food for instance), put frame of young larvae in the middle and a frame with lots of stored pollen (bee bread) beside the young larvae frame. Place the emptly gap between those two.
5. Put a plastic sheet on top of the lower box
6. Put a ½ inch stick of wood on the plastic sheet, near the rear of the lower box, this stick provides a rear entrance to the upper box, close other entrances in the upper box.
7. Close the hive for at least 4 hours, more if the weather is bad
8. Do the grafting and put the frame of grafted larvae in the gap in the lower box
9. Wait 24 hours
10. Remove the plastic sheet and wooden stick. Place a queen excluder between the boxes.
11. Wait 4 days (5 days from the start) queencells are capped and it is good practise to protect them if you have gear for that. If not wait 9 days for the cells to be ripe and use them in any queenless hive by putting them between the frames.
 
#123 · (Edited)
Simple no extra gear queen rearing system which can be used all summer in the same colony.

1. Divide a very strong two story colony, which has brood in both boxes
2. Find the queen and put her with the frame she is walking in the upper box. Destroy all queen cells.
3. Shake nurse bees from 4 frames of open brood to the lower box.
4. In the lower box remove one frame (capped extra food for instance), put frame of young larvae in the middle and a frame with lots of stored pollen (bee bread) beside the young larvae frame. Place the emptly gap between thoetc etc etc
And you think all this manipulation is simpler than the Clemens method? Really?
 
#125 · (Edited)
Any system you choose comes down to having enough nurse bees to feed the queen cells royal jelly 1,600 times a day. That's a feeding every 54 seconds, assuming they feed over night time hours, which is probably a false assumption.

Nurse bees do not refuel up with royal jelly instantaneously, so there has to be [B A GREAT NUMBER[/B] of them taking turns.

Clemmens' / LaFerney's method is good for small operations because it uses a smaller number of bee resources (than, say Bro. Adam's / Michael Palmer's method) making only a few queens as the small-time beekeeper needs them, allowing him to grow an apiary without over-committing too many of his precious bee resources in making queens (an activity prone to many failures when first learning queen rearing).

He gets the additional benefit of getting many runs of experience that helps get the many fine details down expertly, resulting in large, healthy queen cells sooner than later.
 
#126 ·
Rearing quality queens is such a fundamental factor in succesfull beekeeping that aiming for simplicity is is not a good practise.
^I agree with the stament
However nuc starter/finishers have a long track of success.
Our own JSL discusses there use in his Bee culture article http://www.beeculture.com/net-gain-cell-building-system/ and has some nice tweeks to the concept.
If he says a nuc starter finisher is good enuff to make a few cells I am willing to take that at face value.
 
#131 ·
thanks kc, glad to hear laferney is keeping busy!

i heard it from someone who heard it from someone that j. clemens was busy taking care of a family member having medical issues.

i sure miss the contribution that both of them were making to the forum.
 
#132 ·
And thank you, SP for the good news about Joseph.

Glad the previous post is appreciated. That is the true beauty of Joseph Clemmens' and David LaFerney's system. It takes us from backyard beekeepers up to sideliners quickly by reducing the resources needed (we don't have that many yet!), making fewer queens more often (as we need them), giving us more queen rearing experience in less time (so details of method may be refined, and cell size tends to get bigger).

We do have to rotate in capped brood on a regular basis - how often you do depends on how many you have in your apiary - to keep the number of 5- to 10-day-old nurse bees up. This will likely be a limiting resource for small-time beekeepers. This system sill be very likely to help that situation - over time and lots of effort :)

I've found that the 12" tall, ventilated, 6-frame nuc' box with a feeder inner cover is better at making queen cells than the 5-frame box. I also find that if I keep it to 16 queen cells, they tend to come out larger and with better take.

Another good idea is an adaptor board to move the mating nuc' colonies into the big boxes. They'll crowd themselves out of the mating nuc' and the queen will get down into the larger box in a week or two.
 
#133 ·
And
We do have to rotate in capped brood on a regular basis - how often you do depends on how many you have in your apiary - to keep the number of 5- to 10-day-old nurse bees up. This will likely be a limiting resource for small-time beekeepers. This system sill be very likely to help that situation - over time and lots of effort :)

I've found that the 12" tall, ventilated, 6-frame nuc' box with a feeder inner cover is better at making queen cells than the 5-frame box. I also find that if I keep it to 16 queen cells, they tend to come out larger and with better take.
I agree. To get well fed queens I would put max 15 larvae into one 2 story 10 frame Langstroth hive (20 frames alltogether), full of bees. This unit is capable to take care of them all summer without adding any brood from other colonies. The new larvae can be put in whatever interval, but not sooner than 5 days (the previous ones have been capped). I usually put new larvae in every Saturday.

I´m not familiar with this Joseps Clemmens method, but why use a 5-6 frame box, if all other hives use say 10 frame Langstroth? More gear, less nursing bees.

(15 or 16 whatever, in my queen rearing frames there is room only for 15 Nicot system cells in one bar.)
 
#137 ·
Regarding queen quality, can anyone explain to me how queens made this way might be of lower quality?
Given that I've been getting 30+ usable cells, each with at least a little bit of royal jelly still left after the queens emerge from a 5-over-5 (deep) comb queenless starter/finisher. I'm not saying it's the end-all, be-all of queen rearing... so don't get me wrong. But a queen that has royal jelly left over when she emerges is as well fed as she possibly could be, right?

Virgin that emerged in the incubator last night:
 
#143 ·
I set it up 10 days ahead of grafting (grafting is therefore on day 11, right) with one frame of pollen / honey and 5 of capped brood. If you can't find pollen and honey on the same frame, youcan put in one of each and only 4 frames of capped brood, but you should add another 2 scoops of nurse bees if you do.

4 days before grafting day, I put in the open brood - Ray Marler's trick to get the girls into nurse mode (feeding babies) - in the slot where the queen cell bar frame will go. The pollen goes right next to it.

The day before grafting, I place the queen cell cup frame in for "polishing". The bees always accept better if they have a day to prepare the queen cells to their own specifications.

On the morning of grafting day, I first take the super fresh pollen out of the freezer to thaw and fill the bucket with hot water, bringing it down to 95 degrees F. I then pull out the open brood and the queen cell frame from the Cell builder. I take the latter into the grafting tent, where I have set up the table, my chair, my 7X loupe, my flashlight, my grafting tools, my bucket of 95 degree F water, my spray bottle, and the net with which I capture the bees that somehow always get inside the tent.

I graft one bar, and go place it in the Cell Builder. Then I graft the next cell bar, then go add it to the queen cell frame in the Cell Builder.

Now I've removed 2 frames and replaced 1, so another frame of capped brood goes in, and I replace the pollen with the thawed-out, SUPER-FRESH POLLEN, which I've shaken into an open, empty comb.

Like Oldtimer, I find that 16 cells at one time usually gets the 100% acceptance, so I rarely even attempt 20 cells. Also, I find he's correct that a 6-frame nuc' is a bit better than a 5-framer.

Hope this helps :)
 
#147 ·
Juhani, Thank you. What Charlie and Oldtimer may mean (please correct me, folks, where I err) is that to get the number of cells drawn that they want, 6-frame boxes have enough size to hold adequate resources. I will be starting off small, trying to get 5-8 QCs per ~10-day cycle, and I rather expect a 5-frame setup to do that adequately.

However, I am at a loss as to what to do about pollen. I never notice a _lot_ of pollen. How worthwhile is it to add pollen patties in addition to pollen in the usual stores frames? I'd expect that if the bees eat it, then it was helpful to them. If they don't, then not so. I've not considered a pollen trap and don't know whether that's what, for example kilocharlie uses to get his pollen that he puts into the freezer. Or should I be able to find pollen dense frames in some hive somewhere?

Michael
 
#149 · (Edited)
Made my first attempt at grafting today....;)
This morning I made what I'll call a "grafting pulpit" kind of a slanted box that can sit on a table or tailgate or whatever, it has an edge to keep the frame from sliding off and an adjustable U-shaped bar that goes over the top that I mounted 2 LED battery lights (160 lumens each) -- held to the bar with rubber bands...I discovered that my 60 year old eyes wasn't the problem or my focal length,, but just a lack of lighting....Whew- I thought I was getting old...
I grafted 10 larve into nicot style cell cup holders and mounted them to a frame. They look like good grafts to me, but we'll see what the girls think of them..LOL...:(
I have to add that I took a grafting class on the weekend and am building off of the practice I got there...
I also prepared a Frankin-Nuc with TONS of bees from a overwintered 5/5/5 nuc and the grafts are from another overwintered nuc (black queen) :) anyway on about memorial day the proof will be in the hatched queens.....




==McBee7==
 
#155 ·
I've never raised a queen but plan to so I'll ask what's maybe a stupid question that's probably been discussed. Why not notch cells with eggs? It should be fairly obvious the cells that got started with larvae by bees that's possibly are not revved up in jelly making mode quite yet. Eliminate those after 2-3 days then let them build from freshly hatching eggs when they should be in full go. Is it strictly a time saving thing or am I missing something?
 
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