how about someone who knows how, doing a write up in simple terms on how its done, whats needed and a rough cost.
When you find queen cells in a colony you rate highly, do an artifical swarm and put the old box on top of the new brood body and supers. You find the queen and put her down below with the flying bees and the younger bees in the supers.
Mission, I wouldn't use any old queen cell. For example I would not use a QC from a colony which has chalk brood or which is too feisty.
Wait a few days until the queen cells in the top box are sealed but make sure of your timing as an early hatcher will swarm or kill the others.
Line up a few nuc boxes and place 2 frames of honey in each. I remove frames of honey from my colonies in April to make room for the queen to lay. If you have a frame with pollen, put that in as well. Go through your top box and any frame with a queen cell gets placed in a nuc with the adhering bees.
Shake in a few more bees or set in another frame with adhering bees which has no queen cell on it.
If there is more than one queen cell you can destroy the smaller ones or attempt to remove them carefully with a sharp blade and put them in mini nucs.
In less than a week the queen cell should hatch.
Check 2 weeks later for any sign of eggs.
Don't tinker or open the nucs earlier than this.
Any flying bees will find there way back to the original colony.
That's it really if you just need a few extra queens.
This works better if you have several colonies as you can select for gentleness, honey production, calmness on the comb etc.
