OTS Queen Breeding?

[Phil Stob]

I've been doing some reading on splits and the different methods.  I ran across the OTS queen breeding method.  On The Spot. 

Mostly developed by Mel Disselkoen, and described on his site for MDA Splitter.  http://www.mdasplitter.com

Basic principle:  Take away the queen and a few frames of capped brood, and leave the rest of the hive.  Notch a few cells. 

Come back in a week and see how many queen cells you have.   Strong hive raises good queens. 

Put 2 queen cells in each nucleus along with frames of brood.

Possible to split a hive 2-6 times, or more.  

Anyone done this method?  Seems straight forward and feasible.  

Lots of info on the web if you search OTS Queen Rearing.

Phil in Phreemont.

You ask so many questions, what answers should I choose?
Is this really Butte, Montana, or just existential blues?

[George McRae]

I've heard and read about it, but you explained wonderfully clearly! I think the trick is notching with a hive tool. You sorta press down on the bottom wall of the cells for like a row of eggs or teeny larva?

George

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[Gerald Przybylski]

That should work. Artificial swarming is a variation of the same thing.

I've heard from several people much smarter than I that one should
look in the hive 4 days after removing the queen....
If there are capped queen cells at that time, they will probably have been
started with  second or third day larva.
Optimum larva age is first day... less than a day after emerging from
the egg.
So if there are  uncapped queen cells on the 4th day, leave them alone.
If there are capped queen cells among the uncapped queen cells, damage
the capped ones
because they will have been started with older larva and will be more
worker-like.
(If there are only capped ones, cross fingers and hope for the best)

A week after that "4th day inspection," the queen cells will be 'day-15'
and should be just about ready to emerge.
They will be well developed and far less fragile compared with day 13 or
14 when they are mushy while undergoing rapid metamorphosis.
Day 14-Day 15 is the right time to relocate extra queen cells into
mating nucs.

'Come back a week later' is, imo, not the optimum...

I used the think all queen cells were worth the effort... I'm more
strategic now.

That's my 2¢

Jerry

[Ronni Brega]

ya know, you’ve posted this before and I read it multiple times and couldn’t get the math. So I have read it again and finally get it. I was thinking “one day old egg” instead of “one day old larva” Sheesh.

I totally get this now. thanks for reposting.

Ronni

[Jim Veitch]

Maybe the bees are smarter than we think.  A footnote from a Randy Oliver article:  [17] The caution is often raised that the emergency queens reared in walkaway splits may be inferior, due to those from older larvae emerging first. This concern is not supported by actual data. Tofilski [[xvii]] found that there is an intense culling process that takes place within the hive, resulting in the vast majority of successfully emerging queens having been reared from very young larvae.

[Sung Han Lee]

Can you elaborate 'Notching a cell or cells?'
First meaning
Second any order or numbers and how do determine which cells?

Sung

[HAL LISKE]

I saw a method that I will try this year.  On the frame of the eggs/larva you use a object (he used bullets) to seal the cell that he wanted to raise the queens in.  Next, with a sifter, sifted flower or powdered sugar over the rest of the frame.  The bees clean out those cells of the sugar and the larva.and raise the queens in the ones that were covered.  It allows spacing the cells  to avoid 2 cells joined and choosing larva that is the right age. It also reduces the amount of larva to raise on the frams so the bees can concentrate on only the queen cell.   Of coarse, plastic frames would not work as well as cross wired ones.  I am still not convinced that the quality of the queens is as good without the use of a cell builder colony.  I am going to try it however because it is a easier starting point for cells earlier in the year.  

On Mon, Jan 21, 2019 at 9:49 PM Phil Stob <phil...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[George McRae]

Hi Sung,

This vid shows how to...... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7r0aDi_NxU

George

[Kevin Mulvey]

Really good video.   And I really like the metal frames hangers.  The hide is super-tidy and easy to manage, almost zero propolis.  Does anyone know if these boxes and frames are available locally or by mail?    

[Phil Stob]

Those are British National hives.  Slightly different size from our equipment. 

Cheers, 

Phil Stob

510-996-8946

phil...@gmail.com

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[Phil Stob]

Here is Michael Bush's take on the subject.

Pretty much the same, but add some new yellow wax so that the bees build queen cells out of the most appropriate cells, and notching isn't as important.  

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesafewgoodqueens.htm

Cheers, 

Phil Stob

510-996-8946

phil...@gmail.com

[Charles Carlson]

Hey George, 

Thanks! Great video.  Notching was a complete waste of time.  The splitting  process regardlessly seemed to work to produce queen cells.  Most informative to me was the careful reduction in number of queen cells allowed to go forward, one per nuc.  I really screwed up on that last year.  Events were amazing but not to my liking or intentions.

Charles

On Thursday, January 24, 2019 at 8:35:21 AM UTC-8, George McRae wrote:

Hi Sung,

This vid shows how to...... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7r0aDi_NxU

George

On Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 8:28 PM Sung Han Lee wrote:

Can you elaborate 'Notching a cell or cells?'
First meaning
Second any order or numbers  and how do determine which cells?

Sung

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[Jim Veitch]

I'd like to second that it's a great video. Last year I did swarm splits and I wanted to get ahead of the curve this year. I like the idea of the OTS method to do that. The hive I did yesterday went to plan.  I found the queen (on the 16th frame inspected) and placed her in a nuc with a couple of frames with an extra shake of bees.  I notched 3 frames,in about 5-6 spots so I'll be interested to see if any of it works as advertised in spite of Charles' experience.

Today I went into a second hive to do the same thing and discovered 2 capped queen cells on one frame and more uncapped queen cells in the upper brood box. Didn't plan for that so off to get another bottom board and lid. I found a queen and put her in a nuc. Eggs and young brood present (and a populous hive) make me think I caught them before swarming and I split the rest of the hive 50-50.  In the upper brood box set to the side went the 2 capped queen cells after destroying the uncapped ones. The bottom half of the brood chamber stayed in position to collect the foragers.  However I was premature in culling the other queen cells as a cursory look in the lower brood box failed to find any queen cells (it was now about 5 pm)..  But there was some young brood and eggs so I notched there.

Jim

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[George McRae]

Hey Jim!

I used the method, without notching. I had previously checkerboarded into the mother hive foundation-less frames, in the brood nest. Back in January. So when I pulled the queen she was found on one of the frames with new wax. When I inspected the following week for cells, almost all were on the new wax/frames. I surmise that because the new wax is still plaint, they were able to fashion cells pretty easily. One frame had seven, another had five, one two and two each of one. I left the seven in the mother hive. the rest I distributed into a queen castle. The seven spun off a swarm, which two days later ( witnessed by Elinor Levine...)  flew into a waiting hive box I had baited with LGO/Alice lure. I also had a baited trap too, and over the two days the bees had vigorous debate, but settled on the hive. Two of the queen castle nucs didn't make it. The mother queen is doing nicely. There are laying queens in the mother hive, the adjacent hive, And two of the castle chambers. So the one hive went to five hives. We'll see how it ll turns out. Upshot is that the OTS method is simple and reliable. 

George

[Jim Veitch]

Hi George,

I was not as organized as you about the checkerboarding so am forced to try the notching.  How did you make your queen castle?  I can see I am going to run out of enough equipment as soon as those queen cells get capped!

Jim

[Greg Mau]

Jim,

Based on my singlar personal queen castle experience, having witnessed one other, and having had someone else relate their experience...  Queen Castles are a problem.  The one I used had two frames per section.  All the foragers from the origination hive ended up trying to get into the two frame section pointed in the direction of the origination hive.  Needless to say, there were loads of bees hanging out front.  I never saw any dead bees, but it was a very unsettling for several weeks.

My suggestion would be to NOT be overly greedy with the queen cells, split the source hive resources, brood, AND nurse bees amongst 5-frame NUCS the best you can,  stack the NUCs (at least for the first several days... maybe weeks) right next to each other and with all the entrances in the same direction.

I have no hard data to support this... but feel that Queen Castles do not provide the "pheromone separation" that NUCs do.  You could see where the bees tried to chew through the walls to get to neighboring castle cells and I wonder how much this had to play on returning queens.

Greg

[Phil Stob]

I have a queen castle to lend if anyone want to try one, or two out.  

Cheers, 

Phil Stob

510-996-8946

phil...@gmail.com

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[George McRae]

I have a loaner too. it's the one with two 2 frame chambers and two 3 frame chambers.

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[Jim Veitch]

Thanks so much for the feedback.  It makes it much easier to navigate the confusion of what to do and hopefully reduces the number of errors I will make in the process.  I may give the queen castle a try but thanks to Greg for the caution.  Phil, are you coming by Wednesday?  If so I might take you up on your kind offer of a loaner.

[Jim Veitch]

I split my 3rd and final hive today, The hive is 3 deeps and 2 medium supers and had brood in every box except the top one. I killed this queen as they are kind of aggressive, cut them back to 2 deeps and 2 supers and distributed brood plus nurse bees frames to the queens from my first two hives split on the weekend.  I found one queen cell, just capped that I nipped as I won't breed from this hive unless the others all fail. Now I have 4 strong queenless hives for making queens and 2 smaller queenright hives.  I'll definitely think I'll try out Phil's queen castle for the young queen cells that I'll be taking next weekend.

On Sun, Apr 21, 2019 at 6:28 PM Jim Veitch <jvei...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Ron C]

Thanks to Jim for letting me tag along and learn about queen rearing and literally learning “on the job” as a newbie.

Jim can report his results, but I got the chance to help harvest honey supers, experience gentle bees (vs slightly more temperamental bees), locate queen cells “peanuts”, locate queen larva, and identify drones, etc, etc.

Invaluable experience for a first time new “beek”

Thanks Jim!

[Jim Veitch]

I borrowed Phil's queen castle and filled it up with 4 queen cells today.  Of the 2 hives where I sequestered the queens into nucs a week ago, one hive only had 2 frames with queen cells so Ron and I left one and took the other and placed it in my hot ("temperamental") hive that I dequeened last Tuesday (after Ron & I killed close to 15 or more.queen cells).  My other hive where I took out the queen had enough frames with capped queen cells to fill up the queen castle.  The queen cells built in the notches are half in the brood comb.

[Charles Carlson]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14uNM8QUbBFV-hXZQ-VoFzvF4GbkTt5pv/view?usp=drivesdk
Hi Jim, et al.
I just posted another paper by Adam Tofilski in which he looks at the age of queens produced through emergency cells. Worker bees to an amazing job of culling the queen cells. I keep wondering if we a beekeepers don’t wind up doing lots of inadvertent things that “work” to improve things, but really are just ineffective behaviors in the noise of life. It may be that keeping a close watch on the hives is the main thing rather than notching cells, culling queens, and generally fiddling around with various reproductive strategies. Honey bees are an amazing adaptable species just like humans, and that may just be our projective illusion.

[Jim Veitch]

HI Charles, I can't get access to your link, you might want to turn on sharing.  Weirdly, Jerry and I were having a private discussion about this, here is what I just wrote to him, and it includes a reference to another paper along the same lines, that workers cull for quality:

"I run on a 6-7 day cycle for possible intervention because I still work and weekends typically the only time I have for hive manipulation.  So my queens may be from older larvae.  I did mostly leave the bees in the queen castle all the queen cells on a frame so they can decide to cull should they decide to cull.  One of the hives I split a week ago already had a capped swarm or supersedure cell that I left in a separate box. I left a super of honey on top above the inner cover of that box as I ran out of time and yesterday morning I picked up that super to extract.  I blew the few bees there were off the capped combs but saw a bee head first in a empty cell one of the frames.  When she came out she was the hatched queen.  I went through the brood frames and there were still at least 6 unhatched but recently capped queen cells that I removed (my queen castle was already full).  So the bees were in no hurry to tear them down.  My rationale for removing was to prevent any possible attempt at swarming though I wonder if I would have been better off just leaving alone (perhaps the bees would kill her if they decided one of the other queens would be better for them).

In controlled experiments where the bees have no choice, queens reared from older larvas are lower quality (on average), but in more natural settings the literature I have seen about quality and age of larvae is conflicting and mostly "lore" on both sides, e.g.,  http://www.bushfarms.com/beesemergencyqueens.htm  The study cited by Bush here shows that workers actively protect queen cells from emerged queens: http://agris.fao.org/agris-search/search.do?recordID=US201500223247. This article cites another article that demonstrates workers also actively cull emergency queen cells to control for quality (and quality is independent of age of larvae if the workers have choices): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s000400050159.  I am going from just the summary sections as getting the full articles requires registration and payment."

[Charles Carlson]

Hi Jim,

Oh! At least the reply made it through to your post.  Try this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14uNM8QUbBFV-hXZQ-VoFzvF4GbkTt5pv/view?usp=sharing

Somehow I associated my char...@icloud.com with google drive in an odd way, and now the char...@icloud.com email is screwed up using google drive.  This may have fixed the immediate problem.

Swarm cells, and eggs (and day old larvae ?)  transferred to queen cups, real or artificial, seem like the ones to get the most consistent reproductive nutrition. which give rise to the biggest queens.  There are so many variables at play in any emergency situation.  This paper provides an interesting look at the various factors in play when a hive goes queen less.

C

On Monday, April 29, 2019 at 9:23:12 AM UTC-7, Jim Veitch wrote:

HI Charles, I can't get access to your link, you might want to turn on sharing.  Weirdly, Jerry and I were having a private discussion about this, here is what I just wrote to him, and it includes a reference to another paper along the same lines, that workers cull for quality:

"I run on a 6-7 day cycle for possible intervention because I still work and weekends typically the only time I have for hive manipulation.  So my queens may be from older larvae.  I did mostly leave the bees in the queen castle all the queen cells on a frame so they can decide to cull should they decide to cull.  One of the hives I split a week ago already had a capped swarm or supersedure cell that I left in a separate box. I left a super of honey on top above the inner cover of that box as I ran out of time and yesterday morning I picked up that super to extract.  I blew the few bees there were off the capped combs but saw a bee head first in a empty cell one of the frames.  When she came out she was the hatched queen.  I went through the brood frames and there were still at least 6 unhatched but recently capped queen cells that I removed (my queen castle was already full).  So the bees were in no hurry to tear them down.  My rationale for removing was to prevent any possible attempt at swarming though I wonder if I would have been better off just leaving alone (perhaps the bees would kill her if they decided one of the other queens would be better for them).

In controlled experiments where the bees have no choice, queens reared from older larvas are lower quality (on average), but in more natural settings the literature I have seen about quality and age of larvae is conflicting and mostly "lore" on both sides, e.g.,  http://www.bushfarms.com/beesemergencyqueens.htm  The study cited by Bush here shows that workers actively protect queen cells from emerged queens: http://agris.fao.org/agris-search/search.do?recordID=US201500223247. This article cites another article that demonstrates workers also actively cull emergency queen cells to control for quality (and quality is independent of age of larvae if the workers have choices): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s000400050159.  I am going from just the summary sections as getting the full articles requires registration and payment."

On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 8:48 AM 'Charles Carlson' via The Alameda County Beekeepers Association <the-alameda-county-beekeepers-association@googlegroups.com> wrote:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14uNM8QUbBFV-hXZQ-VoFzvF4GbkTt5pv/view?usp=drivesdk
Hi Jim, et al.
I just posted another paper by Adam Tofilski in which he looks at the age of queens produced through emergency cells.  Worker bees to an amazing job of culling the queen cells. I keep wondering if we a beekeepers don’t wind up doing lots of inadvertent things that “work” to improve things, but really are just ineffective behaviors in the noise of life.  It may be that keeping a close watch on the hives is the main thing rather than notching cells, culling queens, and generally fiddling around with various reproductive strategies.  Honey bees are an amazing adaptable species just like humans, and that may just be our projective illusion.

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[Jim Veitch]

A followup on my OTS experiment.  Overall, I'd have to say it had mixed success..

Success includes preventing all swarming in my three strong hives, so getting a lot of honey per hive and providing no postings on the swarm list nor extraction work for anyone.

Failure includes all 4 queen cells in the queen castle not making it.

One of two queen cells each placed in larger splits made it OK.

I had terrible mating success with 1 out the two larger splits and 2 of the 3 big hives going queenless even though I am sure they had virgin queens.  I did recover one of the queenless hives with a second queen they reared a month later.

Going in I had 3 2018 queens, coming out I have one 2018 queen, and three 2019 queens.

Of the three original hives, I selected 2 queens as breeders and I killed the third queen because of aggressiveness.

Details

April 20 I placed the 2 queens in 2 separate nucs and added bees from the aggressive hive to bolster their numbers.  A week later I took queen cells from the two breeder hives and killed all the queen cells from the aggressive hive.

Queen castle (4 compartments of 2 frames each):

Queen cells placed in 2 compartments completely torn down with no trace left.  No queens seen

Queen cells placed in a third compartment hatched but no queen seen.

Queen cell placed in the 4th compartment never hatched.  Dead queen found inside the cell,

Queen castle success rate: 0.  Verdict on my queen caste experiment: unsuccessful for reasons I don't understand, maybe not enough bees.

Two other non-queen castle splits with queen cells made at the same time:  Both these had a lot more bees than the queen castle compartments.

(1) I saw the hatched queen but she disappeared after that. New splits have few foragers and I suspect a blue jay that hangs around may have eaten her because she would have flown out with few companions.  Lesson is to place new splits with entrances not convenient to birds.

(2) The queen cell in the other split hatched a queen that started laying about 17 days after the split.

Queen cells in the 3 original hive locations:

(1) I saw a hatched queen cell with other later queen cells torn down, but no eggs 29 days later on 5/19, so I added a frame with eggs and young brood. No queen cells got pulled but still no queen, eggs or brood 16 days later (6/4) so as I wasn't around Jennifer Radtke kindly united them with the new queen from the surviving split.

(2) I saw a queen hatching 14 days later, but no eggs 15 days after that (5/19) so added a frame with eggs and young brood. No queen cells pulled and the new queen started laying soon after adding the frame.

(3) I saw no queen or young brood 31 days later (5/21), so added a frame with eggs and young brood. They pulled queen cells and a I saw a new queen just starting to lay today (6/16), 28 days after adding the eggs and young larvae.  So that hive is salvaged.

Counting the big hives and the bigger splits all queen cells hatched but only 2 out the 5 mated OK.  No drone layers so if they survived then they mated. I'm not sure why I had such a high loss rate but I did see blue jays hanging around all of my hives and splits in early May and taking bees.

Sequestered 2018 queens in nucs:

(1) One is laying fine, filled up the nuc and now has filled up a deep.

(2) The other sequestered queen disappeared almost immediately after I added bees from the aggressive hive (maybe they killed her?). Though the other queen was fine with the bees I added to her nuc.

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[Greg Mau]

You are the fourth (out of four) person that has been unsuccessful with the Queen Castle.  I am calling the Queen Castle concept a flop.

[Phil Stob]

The Queen Castle is not a new concept, and has been used for years, so apparently it does work for some (or many).  There is some key component missing for success that we apparently we have missed. More research is needed. 

Certainly making splits into 5 frame nucs seems to be the most robust method.  Its easy to get greedy when you see all of those queen cells. 

Cheers, Phil 

On Jun 16, 2019, at 10:01 PM, Greg Mau <gmau...@earthlink.net> wrote:

You are the fourth (out of four) person that has been unsuccessful with the Queen Castle.  I am calling the Queen Castle concept a flop.

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[Greg Mau]

While it is possible that there may be some "magic key" that we just haven't uncovered, it's also possible that people just aren't able to give up on a cool idea.  A quick net search shows loads of people showing how to make a Queen Castle but I've yet to see a report of success.  If there was a "magic key", you would think that it would be the very first thing brought up.

Four out of four...  How again does that definition of insanity go?

[Jim Veitch]

I did research this before I tried it out and there are credible reports of success (e.g   https://honeybeesuite.com/how-to-start-a-queen-in-a-two-frame-nuc/ ).  I suspect that I didn't put enough nurse bees and/or ready to hatch brood in each compartment to handle our cold spring.

On Sun, Jun 16, 2019 at 10:42 PM Greg Mau <gmau...@earthlink.net> wrote:

While it is possible that there may be some "magic key" that we just haven't uncovered, it's also possible that people just aren't able to give up on a cool idea.  A quick net search shows loads of people showing how to make a Queen Castle but I've yet to see a report of success.  If there was a "magic key", you would think that it would be the very first thing brought up.

Four out of four...  How again does that definition of insanity go?

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[Keyur Karnik]

I had a successful split from 2 brood frames and nurse bees, but in a 5 frame nuc (the other three frames were empty / patty/ drawn comb. I didn't have too many bees, but they made a new queen or three, and did really well (at 14 frames now)

So, I think it is the lack of space, as well as the close proximity of multiple nucs that causes the issue. I would rather use the long hive and convert that into 6 or 7 nucs and that could be called a castle. The current castle is more like dorm than a castle.

Cheers,

Keyur

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[Greg Mau]

Me... 2 out of 6 (2 dead outs and 2 queenless)... 4 splits in one castle and 2 in another

Jim... 0 out of 4

George... 3 out of 5

Issues I see/saw with Queen Castle:

1)  only two frames... One of which was selected purely because it had the queen cell(s), leaving only one frame to set up the balance of the split section with resources and brood.  Might work better if queen cells were cut out and placed in one of the two spit set-up frames, but that wasn't an option with foundation frames.

2)  entrances on four sides... All the foragers wanted to go into the section with the entrance pointed in the direction of the original hive.  Try to imagine foragers from 20 frames (two 10-frame boxes) trying to get into 2 frames?  Rotating did not work.  Orienting at 45 degrees seemed to split the foragers between two but still left two sections without any/many.

3)  no external feeding provisions... Would have been good to be able to feed the sections without foragers and/or adequate resources

4)  inadequate "pheromone separation"...  Post OTS exercise eval revealed that bees had been trying to chew through the boards separating the sections.  Seems to reason that a returning queen would less inclined to set up shop in a house that appears to already be queened.

As a "first-time-splitter", I would call my 2 out of 6 a success because it resulted in being able to give away two (be they..."very tiny") colonies AND the exercise prevented my (at the time) bursting-at-the-seams hive from swarming.  Going forward, I would opt to use NUC's vs. a Queen Castle and be less greedy with trying to maximise queen cell use.  In other words, the number of splits would be determined by the available brood, house bees, and resources vs. the number of queen cells.  NUC's would allow more leeway in setting up the splits and entrance orientation.  I would set all the NUCs oriented with their entrances in the same direction and separate/reorient them relative to each other a little at a time.

[Nicole Voracka]

My queen castles have always been successful. My queen mating success rate is about 75% both in the castle and in regular splits. The magic key for the castle is to provide them with one frame of pollen and nectar plus one frame of young brood they can make queen cells on, or provide a queen cell. Then shake in a ton of nurse bees and put the castle somewhere else so you don't have the issue with foragers trying to only go into one section.

[Jim Veitch]

Hi Nicole, thanks for sharing that.  That was my suspicion, that I made a mistake in not adding enough nurse bees.

On Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 12:52 PM Nicole Voracka <nicole....@gmail.com> wrote:

My queen castles have always been successful. My queen mating success rate is about 75% both in the castle and in regular splits. The magic key for the castle is to provide them with one frame of pollen and nectar plus one frame of young brood they can make queen cells on, or provide a queen cell. Then shake in a ton of nurse bees and put the castle somewhere else so you don't have the issue with foragers trying to only go into one section.

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[Greg Mau]

Nicole... I can see that working.  Would you then just let the foragers then go off and fend for themselves?  In the OTS method, a swarm is simulated by moving the queen right portion away and putting the split(s) in the original location.  Loading the splits with nurses and moving them away won't solve the homeless foragers issue.

[Nicole Voracka]

I make up the castles by taking 2 frames each from several hives, so the original hives are still there.

You can also try taking the queen and about 3 frames of brood/nectar/pollen, put those into a nuc temporarily, and leave the original hive to make emergency queen cells. Then once the cells are capped, put the nuc with the queen back into the original hive and take all the frames with queen cells and load them into your castle, making sure to give each compartment a frame of food (pollen and nectar) plus a frame with queen cells and then shake a lot of nurse bees in and move the castle somewhere else. This method is easier on the bees in the castle because after waiting one week for the original hive to feed and cap off the queen cells, there is very little feeding that the bees have to do. Even the worker cells will be capped off at this point. All they have to do is hang out and keep the frames warm and wait for the queen cells to hatch and let the queen mate.

[Greg Mau]

Nicole...

Your first method involves having multiple hives from which to pull resources.  We performed the OTS on a single hive as we thought it would be the most typical situation.  We are currently in a situation of relative riches, but if you think back to March/April... there were a LOT of beeless beeks and beekwanabees out there and there weren't many strong hives around to split.  In fact, after Phil Stob led the OTS on our hives, he offered to help others with OTS on their hives and got zero offers.

Your second method is pretty much what we did with OTS except... the castle was put in the original hive location.  The queen right split was very quiet for several weeks because it only had nurse bees.  Moving the castle splits away will have them all being quiet... which isn't all that bad.  Moving the queen right split back the original position after forming the castle splits would solve the homeless forager situation EXCEPT for those that became foragers when the queen right split was in its temporary location.  That might be a tolerable loss.  I kind of like this idea because the original queen gets nearly all of her foragers back.

Do you think it necessary to feed the castle splits since they only has one frame of food, are loaded with nurses, and have nothing coming in from foragers?

[Greg Mau]

We could just swap positions of the queen right split and the castle splits after castle splitting and let the converted foragers from the queen right split find a home in one or more of the castle splits.

I'm liking this even MORE.

[Nicole Voracka]

Yes that would work and solves the problem!

[Gerald Przybylski]

Credible research aside, I think two frames are sufficient for making a queen.
The food frame should have BOTH nectar and pollen.
The brood frame, of course must have eggs and young larva.
The number of house bees must be sufficient in each compartment.
The queen castle should be moved to some quiet place where competition won't be excessive.
No harassment... no robbing...
Berkeley and North Oakland have a high density of beekeepers and relatively small yards
that don't allow for spreading out colonies as Tom Seeley suggests in Darwinian beekeeping.

Remember... queens can be raised in those mini-nucs on a few of those half-medium-frames
in a small insulated box.  There's a beekeeper in Marin who takes orders, and raises
a batch of those mini-nucs for her customers for the past few years (since split squads were established).
Those things make it with a cup or so of bees... that's fewer than 1000.

This year I got three nucs established with mated queens and two where the bees apparently
abandoned the boxes.  So I'll try again while there are still lots of drones around.

Two colonies assayed for Varroa in the last week had 4 and 2 mites respectively per 300 bees.
One was a swarm that moved into the yard early in the year. The other has a daughter queen
of the yellow dot queen with the colony that had zero mites in a sugar roll.
None were treated.  Gotta start some more of those genetics...

That's my 2¢
jerry

On 6/17/19 12:11 AM, Keyur Karnik wrote: