Hi there. The method we like to use for cell building for raising queen cells is called the cloake board method and we are going to describe the way we use that cloake board, lots of different ways of doing it but we've developed a system that works out pretty well for us. So we'd like to demonstrate that it is rather confusing and there's lots of different steps but we'll try to convey that information to you. I'd like to first of all go through the basic set up of the hive, list all of the components, and later on we'll describe what each of those are used for. So starting at the bottom we have a normal bottom board down here, and then a wood rimmed queen excluder, and then a normal brood chamber with no entrance hole in it. We've actually taped any entrance holes shut. Then above that we have another queen excluder a wood rimmed queen excluder. We use wood because the edges aren't bent and there are no leaks to the outside. And then this is the cloake board that you'll see a little bit more later, but it's a frame that has a groove all the way around the inside of it, so this metal piece can slide in and slide out. As you can see it's in the out position right now. Above that we have another queen excluder, another brood chamber with the entrance hole taped shut, another wood rimmed queen excluder and then a hive top feeder. There are reasons for all of these queen excluders but it basically has to do with preventing queens from moving around from place to place. What we do when we are setting it up is we make sure the queen is down in the bottom box. So she is there right now and then the top box we are going to prepare to accept the graft that we are going to put in, the graft frame that we will be putting in tomorrow. So we do this job and then the next day is our graft day and then two days after our graft day we pull this slide out into this position and we do this on a weekly schedule so every week we do the cell builder preparation on Monday, the graft on Tuesday and the slides come out on Thursday.

And then we repeat that process the next week. If we keep managing this we can run this cell builder all summer long and produce queens all throughout the summer like our little queen machine here. So we'll get started. First thing we are going to do is find the queen in the bottom brood chamber. So we'll take the hive apart. We do get a little rough with the bees here, not rough but we are shaking things around, so I'll be putting my veil on here. So there you can see the cloake board has the grooves all the way around there and we are just going to put this in the closed position. We'll wiggle it around a bit to get it all freed up. At the beginning of the season we put vaseline in these grooves to help prevent the bees from propolising it shut so it is relatively easy to move in and out. at the end of this video we'll show you why we are using all of these queen excluders, but now we are ready to find the queen. We make sure that these cell builders have young queens so there are less issues with supersedure and we make sure the queens are marked because we are finding them every week in amongst a whole mess of other bees. There she is. OK, what we'll be doing is shaking all of the bees from this box into a new box over here and this box has a frame of foundation and a graft frame in it all ready to go. So we put those frames into place and we shake 10 frames from this box, which is the bottom box, and then we shake five frames from the top box into here, so we are condensing a lot of bees in that top box so they are in a good position to be able to raise the queens. As we are doing this we shake every frame off, even the five that will stay in here, we shake those bees off as well, but we shake them into the bottom box here, so every frame all the bees are completely removed from the frame so that we can check them to see if they're raising any of their own cells on the brood combs. We have to destroy those cells because if they hatch out they will destroy the queens that we are trying to raise.

So that is a critical thing that we need to do that once a week to prevent that from happening. We call them rogue cells or wild cells the ones that they raise on their brood comb, and we have to be very very carful not to miss even one of them. So now we have the whole crew and we'll get set up to shake these frames and get going. We'll just take these frames out of the bottom brood chamber. The young bees tend to be stationed down there because there's lots of young brood and we want those young bees now up into the cell building box. We give those a sharp shake and then we pass them over to Brooke and Brooke is going to check for queen cups like this. We don't even bother looking to see if there are eggs in them, we just destroy anything that looks like a queen cell. And Brooke you show David how you tip the frame there to look and you can see up into this hole here and that makes it really easy to see them, but we kind of just check the whole thing over and pinch them off and destroy them. Once she has checked that frame over she then passes them over to Dave and he does a double check to make sure that there's no queen cells there. We find it's important to have two people looking. They are really focused if they know somebody is going to be checking up on them and it's absolutely critical that we don't miss one. Dave then sorts the frames out into brood or food stores, and that'll make it a little bit easier later when we we are putting the frames back in. All the frames come out of the hive are shaken off before we put any of them back into the hive. So we'll shake another frame, pass it over, remove any cells or cups. We usually have several people doing this first stage of checking for the cells and cups and then only one person doing the double checking. If we have a team of people working at this it goes very quickly and we do run multiple cell builders, so we are just showing you doing one cell builder, but as soon as we are done one we'll move on to doing the others.

We run two to three cell builders per week, and that gives us 100 to 150 cells per week. What you saw a little earlier were queen cups so there may have been eggs in them but they're just the cups. These are cells right here and they may be even be further ahead than the queens that we're rearing in this colony so we definitely have to destroy them. I count nine of those cells capped cells on this frame alone, so we just pull those off and destroy them and move along and get the other seven, but there are quite a few here so we have to check through and get all of them. So now we'll go through the rest of the hive, we'll shake all these frames into this box, we'll shake half these frames into this box, and then we'll kind of wrap up at the end as we are putting the frames back into place. One frame we haven't looked at yet is the graft frame from last week. So we look through here and we count the number of cells just looking along the bottom here you can see that's nicely drawn, but there's a miss, there's another good one, another good one, another good one. So we count these to see how well we've done, but once we've counted them we put them into the cell builder in the second position. In that position there and then we put a frame with foundation next to them, so there is honey frame here, the graft frame and then a frame with foundation. We are trying to discourage the bees from building excess comb around those queen cells. Now we'll move over to these frames that we've got taken out. We've shaken most of the bees off them or preferably all of them, and then we've checked them for cells and then we've sorted them out. Dave's got all brood frames here, there are 12 of them, and these are honey frames, some of which we'll use some of which we'll take out of the hive to provide more empty space for bees to build comb and lay eggs and so on. So we'll just take these frames out and what I am looking for is to see whether there is any young larva or not in them.

This one has some capped brood that is hatching out some capped brood here that is hatching out, but no young larva so they go up into the top box. We don't want a lot of larva in here to compete with the graft larva for food, but we do find one frame that has just a little bit of young brood on it so open brood and we put that right next to the graft frame so that the nurse bees are stationed right next to the graft frame. This graft frame that we put in the new one we'll be putting into the central space, and we are just putting that in there to have the bees polish those cups and if you watch our video on grafting you'll see what those polished cups look like. So we put that in there and that stays in there for 24 hours. On one side of it we put a frame that's got just a little bit of young brood and on the other side of it we put a frame that's got a lot of pollen in there so all the resources they need to raise queens are stationed in that location. We'll just carry on transferring frames over. This one's got some emerging brood on it, but no young brood. This one it's the same thing, a lot of older brood on here emerging bees but no young brood. So by putting this up here we are guaranteeing that there is going to be more young bees up in position there. The young bees are the ones that are the nurse bees that feed the queens. This one has very little capped brood on it so I am going to put it down in the bottom box near the outside, it's mostly honey. This frame has a very small amount of open brood, so it's a perfect one to station right beside the graft frame to get those nurse bees over there and now I just need to find a pollen frame to put in this position here. I expect the rest of these have young brood on them, which they do, that's full of young brood so it goes down here in the bottom box. That one is pretty much just a bit of nectar.

Some eggs on that one but mostly honey or nectar, so it'll go near the outside. Undecided on that frame at this point, it's mostly capped brood. Very little young, some young brood kind of mixed frame there. A lot of young brood on that one so it's down here, and lots of young brood kind of mixed though. So we put those all in the middle here all those brood frames. Snug that one up because it had some eggs on it and now we can fill up this with empty frames or foundation frames, so we can give the queen lots of room to lay here. It's mostly empty there and more empty comb here. So we are giving the queen lots of space to lay eggs. We can then introduce that queen, or reintroduce her rather. So down she goes and we put the first queen excluder in place. This keeps the queen from getting up into the top box and destroying the cells. Then we put our cloake board into position and we put our second queen excluder into place here. The queen excluders on either side of the top box are used to prevent any virgins that may be in the air from flying in and destroying our cells. Virgins are looking for a queenless home sometimes and so this portion will be queenless and so it's quite attractive to virgins and they could come in and destroy all the work that we've done. So we use that to keep them out. We put a frame that's got pollen, this is a pollen frame here. We're going to put that right next to the queens. We'll put in our last brood frame here and then we put a queen excluder on top here and our pollen paddy. Puff smoke to get the bees out of the way there. And there you can see a nice big fat pollen paddy. It's made of pure pollen and sugar syrup, gives the bees all the protein they need to be feeding those baby queens. I like to have it on top of the queen excluder because then when we need to get into this box we can just lift it up without having to mess around with that pollen paddy. So we'll transfer this box over and put it in this position here now.

Can you hold that thing up here? Full of bees, lots of resources. Then we put our feeder into position up here. That was a very fat pollen paddy so I'm having to squish it down a little bit. And then without knocking those bees off we'll lift this inner cover up. We do have straw in here so the bees have floats to walk on to get that syrup without drowning. And we pour a little bit of sugar syrup in. How much we put in depends on what kind of a nectar flow is happening. We dribble a little down through the crack in the middle and get them going. And that'll be enough there we've got a good nectar flow happening right now. And we'll set that into place there, brush off any bees and put the lid back on top of the colony. That's the process. Tomorrow we are going to come back, take the feeder off, take the queen excluder off, remove the graft frame that's in there to be polished, graft into that frame, put it back into position within an hour, close the hive up and then two days later we come along and we pull that slide out about halfway. I'm going to shut it for now, but so what happens here is these are queenless, they can't smell a queen because of this slide here and we are taking advantage of two impulses to get them to raise queens: swarm tendency, so lots and lots of bees cause that and super sedure, an emergency super sedure since they can't smell a queen. When we pull this slide out it allows the bees to sort of normalize within the colony and they continue to raise those queens on only the swarm impulse. We find that we get pretty good results using this method, a lot of steps to it but once you get going at it and work out some efficiencies it goes pretty quickly and we're quite happy with it. There's more information about this system in the Ontario Beekeepers' Association Queen Rearing Manual, so you can read more information about that at that point. The last point I want to mention is what we do at the very beginning of this process is we bring in two very strong colonies from other yards and set them up in this position.

We put one colony with the entrance facing to the back, the other colony with the entrance facing to the front, we remove one queen and leave the best queen there and unite these two brood chambers with newspaper, and then within about a week we then set it up like this with all the queen excluders and cloake board and so on. But this way they have two entrances they have an entrance here and they have an entrance at the back, which we have a reducer in because we want those bees to feel really crowded and congested inside the hive. So we have a reducer on the back there are two entrances for the bees to get in and out. That's all I have to say about this at the moment, but we keep evolving this system to try and improve it and it is a work in progress. Thanks for watching. Bye for now.