The Morris Board Method of Queen Rearing

[Poly Hive]

I have given up a long time ago on using queen right colonies for cell STARTING.

I have used queen right colonies for many years to finish off started cells, (from 24 hours age) to virgins hatching in cages.

I have not seen any influence on the queen cell starting on the brood box of the hives I have been *abusing*.

However the stronger the colony the less the amount of queen substance around. When using a queen right colony for work with cells I use the top super, and if that is not that full of bees I move one up that is, and give them the grafts as they will not abandon them though it is interesting that they usually reject a couple that the starter box have said are fine.

PH

 

[mbc]

I've used a Cloake board (same in principle as Morris board but no division in the top box)and only once had queencells started in the bottom box and that was due to the queen dissapearing

 

[buffalow]

hi Rab take a look at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVKLgBgYPok

this man seems to be doing ok with natural cells he does state the bees need the confinement to produce good cells,

mark

 

[jezd]

nice vid, and v.nice bees

 

[Poly Hive]

And he is located where?

Sorry guys but some one has to throw the reality bucket for the UK.

PH

 

[drstitson]

bump

bump


rab - did you go down this line? how did it go if so?

had a talk on it at bee club last night.

steady stream of queens rather than a glut. enough for 1-2 nucs (and perhaps the odd apidea) each time.

can't see problem with 14x12 as top box equally bigger.

make a proper board IMHO rather than butchering a super - only a few mins extra work.


BTW PH - Morris was based in Yorkshire so must have worked fine there originally. and was widely adopted by UK bee breeders after WW2.

 

[oliver90owner]

No, I didn't.

A combination of several reasons, one of which (indicated by the plethora of beeks who were complaining about non-mated queens) was due to the weather being so awful for early mating.

By the time I deemed it prudent to go ahead (late May) I simply condensed a huge hive, which was in the throes of building queen cells. With encouragement they produced several good queen cells and I finished splitting the colony seven or eight ways. Six went into three-frame nucs, the remains of the colony looked after another cell and the queen headed up another box. All very easy, enough for what I required, and all done in the one week.

Around the same time I collected two tiny casts, which I threw together to make a small swarm, so had more than enough queens around the place to satisfy my needs. I am expecting to take just one, perhaps two, small colonies (six frame poly jumbo nucs) into the winter as insurance against spring drone layers.

Regards, RAB

 

[drstitson]

good points rab - obviously walk away splits are the easiest one hit way to get increase and are what i've used this year.

however if big hive does not equal that which you want to breed from then using the MB method provides a controlled flow of material for requeening and increase without too much effort/cost.

 

[beebreeder]

RAB
Am I not right in thinking you have a dartington or beehaus, they are good for small scale queen rearing.
kev

 

[oliver90owner]

Yes, have both, but the colony I particularly chose was huge, in a different location and the Dartingtons were in use anyway. I simply did the minimum to get them to build queen cells.

I like the Dartingtons for rearing a few queens but the situation was ripe with that particular hive - plenty of brood in two 14 x 12 boxes with supers above. Removing some honey and re-arranging the colony was all I needed to do. I don't complicate matters any more than necessary. It worked out well with queen cells well spaced, so I just removed the queen initially then split the whole two boxes into nucs. Might have made nine from the one hive as I remember I had at least one super frame of stores in one of the nuc hives temporarily, for some reason.

Regards, RAB