I've been getting by for five years now with no queen program and it caught up with me this spring . Opening some of the hives they were very low on numbers and became moldy with the low number of bee's and to many box's most still had a queen but she wasn't laying much anymore .Affected hives had plenty of honey no deformed wing virus and other hives that got the same oav treatments were booming coming out of the winter . I was in the habit of catching my on swarms when I wasn't doing good swarm control and in doing so was ending up with even more old queens .I have the losses under control now did a few splits and took the extra queen cells out to replace queens in the hives that were in trouble pretty much all have rebounded and doing well . I,ve been aware for sometime that i needed to raise my own queens and replace queens every two years but i never got it going . I see two ways to start raising my own queens and have them available when i need them , the problem is to have queens early in the season before drones are available for mating I need to overwinter some nucs something i haven't tried yet , the other option is if i could get my hives through later into spring when drones are available then I could raise my own queens using the cloake board method or Joseph Clemens method explained by David Laferney or many other methods . Any insite or ideas from the guys that have been doing this for some time now would be greatly appreciated .