Queen Bee Rearing Method: A Detailed Guide to the Cut-Comb Queen Rearing Technique

Rearing queens by the grafting method easily bruises the larvae, so queens can instead be reared by cutting into capped brood combs. When a colony has grown strong, take 2-3 frames of capped brood together with the queen from the mother colony and place them in a new hive box, add 1-2 frames of honeycomb, and set it beside the original colony. The mother colony then becomes a queenless queen-rearing colony. From it, take one frame of brood comb containing large numbers of eggs and newly hatched larvae, and cut a 200 mm x 35 mm rectangular piece from the central part of the comb so that the eggs and larvae in the cells along the upper edge of the cut are exposed, letting the worker bees build queen cells along the cut edge. Check on the third day and keep 10-20 queen cells whose larvae are developing well and whose position is suitable. Cut away all queen cells that are poorly built or poorly fed, emergency queen cells that were capped early, and all remaining queen cells. Record the age in days of the larvae in the queen cells that are kept, so as to know the date on which the queens will emerge. After the capped queen cells are removed, the queenless queen-rearing colony is merged with the original colony.