Beeyard bloopers from our upcoming giant video on raising queens using the miller method! https://youtu.be/kbfSj0ADf1c

I have had some small nucs from swarms that have grown to full strength hives but this will be my first attempt at starting nucs from scratch...rearing queens, getting them mated, and having the nuc build up to a production hive. My intention is to make up three or four nucs to overwinter...

I going to attempt rearing some queens in a month or so (yeah, tough time of the year! :o ) and will be using 8-frame mediums. I'm intending to use an 8-frame medium as mating box and nuc...a follower board to reduce the space down to from three to five frames to begin with and moving the...

(2nd year beekeeper...) Ok, my single hive died out at the end of March 2013. I replaced it with a nuc in early May (mostly Carni survivor stock bees - with dark brown queen) After 1 month, the hive was doing very well so I bought a full (dark) Carni queen in early June and did a textbook...

I was successful in grafting 18 out of 23 cups a week ago and in checking on the cells today I noted that a couple have regular looking comb encasing the queen cell. What is going on? The comb is much larger than the cell and I am concerned that the queen won't be able to emerge. Has anyone...

Are any of these larvae young enough for possible queen production? I'm trying to get an idea of what size is "ok". This will be for one of the non-grafting type of queen production...even doing a simple split I want to be sure I've got the right age larvae to work with. Thanks, Ed

So I decided to graft a couple weeks ago and it was not successful. I made my own wax cups and attached them to the bars. I placed larvae I them and when I turned them over to place in the hive, mots eggs fell down. The one that were still attached where demolished by my bees to make new comb...

I placed the queen inside the box where she lays. A day later, I got the eggs, put them in a top bar frame and put the top bar frame into a queenless hive. A day after that, I noticed there were only 3 eggs remaining on the top bar frame, and bees were starting to make a queen cell around them...

why is it that swarm cells are on the bottom of the frame and superceedures are towards the top? Is there a specific reason as to why the bees place these differently in the frames?

If a top hive body containing Honey Super Cell was packed with winter stores wouldn't the bees be well on their way to being Small Cell when the cluster moves up in the winter? Acceptance of the HSC would be less of an issue since there's no place to go... And the Super Cell would have been...