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How to Raise Honeybee Queens

While the queen rules the hive, she began just like all the other honeybees as an egg. As queen, she lays the eggs that produce the worker, drone and future queen honeybees. An established colony hosts 80,000 to 200,000 honeybees. Without a queen, a hive dies unless you raise a new honeybee queen.

Things You'll Need

Active hive
Eggs
Razor blade or soldering iron
Inactive hive
Wire or melted beeswax
Queen raising cage

Instructions

- 1
  Locate and cut out an area of cells with eggs in an active hive. It can be difficult to tell the age of the eggs, so monitor empty cells daily and remove them as soon as the queen fills them with eggs.
- 2
  Set the cells into a hive without a queen. You can secure the cell to the hive using melted beeswax as glue.
- 3
  Allow the workers to designate queen cells. Honeybees often create more than one queen cell when a queen has been missing in an attempt to assure the hive's survival.
- 4
  Find the queen cells by looking for a raised section of comb that looks like a peanut shape. Cut out a section with 1 to 2 inches around the queen cell. Leave at least one queen cell for the hive.
- 5
  Wire the queen cell into a queen raising cage. You can also use melted beeswax and glue the queen cell to an empty section of comb.
- 6
  Add honeybees to the queen raising cage. If the honeybees accept the new queen cell, you should have a queen emerge and begin mating.
- 7
  Watch for the queen to lay new eggs.

Insects & Science