Raising Queen Bees at Sleeping Bear Farms

In this part of the process Nikki here is going into a comb, and she’s pulling out larvae that are about 18 hours old (ideally). After about 3 days the egg falls over, because it is gleud and sits on end. It lays down and the larvae hatches out. Within 18 hours or so, it is floating in a little pool of royal jelly. We have these little plastic cups from JZBZ and we stick them on this wooden bar and stick them in some beeswax. Then Nikki goes into the comb, as you can see the pearl larvae and some areas just the royal jelly with the young larvae. She’ll pull them out with this grafting tool, and within minutes fill up a whole bar. We have about 15 cells on a bar.

Once these are full, they go into a starter hive, which is queenless and just chock full of bees.

• The combs are brought in from the breeder hives we pick out for good qualities we desire.
• The best age of larvae is about 18 hours old
• 90 larvae are introduced into the queenless starter