queen banking

tig · July 10, 2005, 07:49:57 PM

hello everyone! i was wondering if anyone can help answer my questions on queen banking. specifically, how many queens can a bank hold at any given time, what is the maximum time the queens can remain in a bank and what is the expected mortality rate if any. Thank you!

Michael Bush · July 11, 2005, 12:50:05 PM

>how many queens can a bank hold at any given time

You could have hundreds in a five frame nuc box full of bees.

>what is the maximum time the queens can remain in a bank

Assuming you don't make the mistake of adding queens or letting them rear one in the bank, probably indefinitely in a free flying bank especially if you add some open brood from time to time. In a battery box you can keep them indefinitely if you keep changing out the nurse bees and giving them water.

>what is the expected mortality rate if any.

If you set it up correctly, by having some queenless bees (preferably from several hives and none of them from the ones the queens came from) and introducing all the queens simultaneously then I'd say about 90%. If you make the mistake of trying to add queens to a bank that already has queens, they may reject the new queens and I'd say it goes up considerably.

Another way I do this is to pull the queens out of the mating nucs and into the battery box and leave the battery box open. Bees from each of the nucs I have removed the queens from tend to get on the cage in the battery box to take care of their queen. Especially if its during orientation flights of young bees. Usually there are enough bees in it by the time I'm done and they are already taking care of their queen.

tig · July 12, 2005, 04:47:59 AM

Thank you very much for the information Michael!

asleitch · July 12, 2005, 06:57:19 AM

This is the old queen bank at Buckfast Abbey

Each of the 40 pull out drawers holds 25 queens which gives a grand total of 1000 queens!

Warm water is circulated around the bank to keep them warm.

You can see the bank properly on the left. I'm in the foreground, and Brother Daniel (who succeeded Brother Adam) is in the background.

Adam

Robo · July 12, 2005, 09:52:35 AM

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing those photos :D

asleitch · July 12, 2005, 11:09:40 AM

Quote from: RoboVery interesting. Thanks for sharing those photos :D

Heres a couple more then!

The buckfast hives in the traditional "square facing outwards"

Queen cups...

The wooden squares visible on the top of the frame fit neatly into the metal cages of the queen bank shown above.

The colonies in the "home" apiary are used for queen rearing

This is a view from the edge of the apiary. You can see all the hives, a few nucleas sitting on top and the shed in the centre distance is where the grafting/queen bank is situated.

For anyone interested, it took just 4 monks 32 years to build this! Thats quite some achievement!!! Thats right, 4 monks. The only help they had was they found some pre-existing foundations when they dug through the grass when they started, and decided to not to bother making new ones!

The inside roof in egg tempera and egg shell

The inside of the abbey building

The main extractor

The honey tanks

And with someone at the far end to give it some perspective....

From memory thats about 5 tonnes they can store, and they can bottle about 1000 jars per hour.

My memory is fading, I did a write up, but can't find it on here.

tig · July 13, 2005, 12:53:23 AM

thank you asleitch! unfortunately i cannot see any pictures! i would love to see them as i'm sure they would be very interesting! is there any way i could get to them?

Phoenix · July 13, 2005, 01:09:09 AM

For those of you that can't view the pics in the post.

Right click on the box where the image should be, in my browser I get an option to view the image. I click on view image, and when I go back to the post the image appears.

Or you can view the properties of the image by right clicking on the box, then click on the properties option, it will give you the address of where the pic is hosted, cut and paste in your browser search.

asleitch · July 13, 2005, 04:12:35 AM

Sorry, I pbase.com was having a wobbly when I extracted the picture URL's, I've been and edited them now, so you should see them - if you don't hold the left "shift" key down and use the mouse to click the "refresh" button, provided shift is held down, it completely downloads the page from scratch, and doesn't rely on any photos it has in the cache.

Anyway, they should be visible now!

Adam