What preparation work needs to be done for artificially rearing queen bees?

Before artificial queen rearing, the following preparation work needs to be done:

(1) Selecting parent colonies. Select healthy, disease-free colonies whose honey or royal jelly yield exceeds the average yield of the whole apiary, with weak swarming tendency and rapid colony development, as parent colonies. The drone colony is the colony that provides drones, and the queen mother colony is the colony that provides queens. Whether drone colony or queen mother colony, both are used to rear bee larvae. The same drone colony can also rear thousands of drones. If only one or two breeding colonies are used every year to rear virgin queens and drones, the whole apiary's colonies will undergo inbreeding, causing a decline in productivity and vitality. Therefore, multiple colonies should be selected and used as drone colonies and queen mother colonies; and queens (or colonies) of the same breed but different bloodlines should be regularly introduced from breeding apiaries.

(2) Rearing breeding drones. The number and quality of drones directly affect the mating success rate of virgin queens, and also affect the pollination effect, thereby affecting the quality of the offspring colonies. Therefore, drone rearing must begin 20 days before starting artificial queen rearing. To rear breeding drones, drone comb must be prepared in advance, or a portion of the lower part of a brood comb can be cut away and inserted into a strong colony to be built into drone comb. Because the queen mates multiple times and drones mate once, to ensure mating quality, the number of drone colonies should be as large as possible, generally rearing drones at a ratio of one virgin queen to 50 drones. The development of a queen from egg to emerged adult takes 16 days, and about 5 days to reach sexual maturity, totaling 21 days. While a drone takes 24 days from egg to emerged adult, and about 12 days from emergence to sexual maturity, totaling 36 days. Therefore, drone rearing must begin about 20 days before artificial queen rearing, so that the sexual maturity periods of drones and virgin queens match. Usually, when breeding drones begin to emerge in large numbers, one can start grafting larvae to rear queens, and at the same time eliminate all drones and drone pupae of other colonies in the apiary.

(3) Preparing queen-rearing colonies. Queen-rearing colonies are strong colonies used to rear queen larvae and pupae. Colonies that are disease-free, free of bee mites, strong in colony strength, with at least 15 frames of bees or more, should be selected as queen-rearing colonies. One day before grafting larvae for queen rearing, move their queen and all brood combs with bees and unsealed brood into a new hive box, placed beside the original colony; the original colony has 6-8 combs (including sealed brood combs, honey combs, and pollen combs) forming a queenless queen-rearing colony, ensuring @#@255@#@ density; shake the bees off extra combs and add them to the queenright colony that was split off, and feed the queen-rearing colony 0.5-1 kg of syrup every evening. A queenright colony with 18-20 frames of bees and a super can also be used as a queen-rearing colony; place a queen excluder between the brood box and the super, confine the queen in the brood box to lay eggs, place one frame of young larvae comb in the center of the super, place a pollen comb on one side, and place the remaining sealed brood combs. Place honey combs on the outer sides. A queenright colony does not have as high an acceptance rate for grafted larvae as a queenless colony, but it cares for sealed queen cells better.