I got a new toy recently. Beekeeping is more expensive than drugs. Its a very expensive habit to develop. We have a few splits, one for each of the full hives. This will hopefully up our chances of keeping a few alive through the winter. If we do lose a hive, we may have a backup nuc to replace it. This will help to defray costs in the long term.

We have several queen cells in many of the hives. In years gone by, we would have simply cut them out to make sure the hive didn’t swarm. As a result of the class I took this past winter, we now know we can harvest those cells, allow the queens to hatch and mate. Once they are established, we will be able to sell the queens and pay for some of the habit with the habit 😁

When I say several, I mean we have 19. This is great, but can also be problematic. When a queen cell hatches, that queen instinctively stings all the other queen cells, killing all the competition. We actually had a situation where there were 2 queen cells ready to hatch, each in separate boxes on the hive. If they both hatched, they would sting all the other cells and then would sting each other or one would take half to two thirds of the foraging workforce with her in a swarm. And since we’ve heard so many of you are excited to buy honey, we want the workers to stay and keep making that sweet honey.

So when we dug out the queen cells, we were able to put them in this queen castle. The queen castle is a 10 frame box. Our normal hives have 8. The box is broken into three sections. Each third can fit 3 deep frames. When I find queen cells, I can put them in this box, shake off some nurse bees and give them some resources. The queen will hatch. The nurse bees will then take care of her until she’s ready to go on a mating flight. Once she mates, she’ll go out and begin laying. At that point, we know she’s mated and we can mark her and sell her to another beekeeper that needs to make a hive queen right. Queens can go for up to $60 depending on the supply available and the time of year. This will save us the money of having to buy queens. It also presents a revenue stream that can help us pay for this habit!

~Chris, the boxing beekeeper