 So I'm going to talk about Queen Ring 101 just because it's good to know what we're talking about when we talk about why we got a grant. And then I'm going to talk about the inspiration for the grant and kind of how we operated. And we'll answer some questions at the end. So this is our Sailors Beekeepers mission statement focusing on beekeeping practices. Our goal is to facilitate a broad spectrum of education, promoting healthy natural systems where people, honeybees and other pollinators can adapt and thrive. So we've been working on this project for about seven years and every year some research paper gets published that just spurs me on. Unfortunately, this is the kind of stuff that spurs our determination to do this work. This was a headline USDA not even a year ago. It was last February where they were publishing research that indicate that 94% of the bees in this country come from the same genetic line in Europe. That's Italy and up in Slovenia and the Caucasus. So that's really depressing because if anything happens that is relative to that genetic makeup, we're going to be in big trouble. But again, this is the kind of stuff, information that's coming out that really tells me that we're on the right track. The other research that is kind of new, they're looking at the effects of shipping this livestock so they will put queen bees in a box or an envelope and mail them to you. And right now the research that I'm hearing is anywhere out of that 70 to 80 degree Fahrenheit range, you are damaging the eggs and sperm in the queen. So these are mated queens. That's the reproductive material and it's getting damaged. So we're paying more higher prices because demand is greater than supply. We're paying higher prices and getting inferior quality product. Another reason why we are raising local queens. So queen drain basics. Honey bee colonies raise queens for three reasons. First one is to propagate. Propagation at the colony level is a swarm. They will replace an aging or failing queen that's called supercedure. Or they will raise an emergency queen when the queen is damaged. And that's usually beekeeper error. Oh, where's the pointer? Okay, never mind. Oh, I need to get rid of that. No pointer? Which one isn't? Oh, that's the advance. No, I mean the point. Oh, okay. Okay, these are queen cells, right? The ones that are hanging vertically. Yeah, so the queen is the large female that is like she gets pregnant and she gets really big. Her abdomen gets really big. So the cells are larger to accommodate the size. This is bee development chart. And I promise you every beekeeper like has this either in a file or as a poster on the wall because we just have to remind ourselves of the development. But basically, I want you to look at the queen. All of the casts are eggs for three days. They're larva for give or take about the same six days. And then the real difference is in their pupation. So they're developing when the cell is capped and they're pupating. The queen emerges much quicker than the other casts. And this is kind of what they look like, you know, egg. Egg to, you know, when they emerge, they look like a bee. I mean, they're kind of fuzzy, but that's an egg, you know, through the grub stage capped and then metamorphosizing under a capped cell. That's beekeeping terminology. Okay. Queen cell development. So from the day an egg is laid to the emergence we saw was about 16 days. The colony can successfully raise a queen from a larva that is almost three days old. So that's day six. Therefore, the shortest time that a colony could raise a queen if you were to pull a frame out, drop the queen on the ground, put the hive back together and they realized they have no queen, they could make a queen in 10 days where the queen is emerging. So we use this information to direct our management. So in the springtime when they're raising new queens we have to be in the hives in shorter periods before, you know, less than 10 days is when we do our inspections. So queen maturation from emergence to egg up to five, she takes five days to harden off, can take a day or up to three days to go out and mate. A couple more days for her eggs and sperm, for the sperm to come down and the spermotheca. So there's a number of days when she's just, you know, maturing in the hive before she starts laying eggs. Where I'm going with this is, I'm sorry, so queen mace with up to 12 drones, that flight can be as short as 18 minutes, which is amazing. When she comes back and starts laying, she can lay between 1,500 and 2,000 eggs per day and that brood will start to be capped in 10 days. And it looks like it's cut off a little bit, but there's twice as much larva open grubs as eggs and four times as much capped brood and where you see my pinky is a queen. Kind of challenging to see, but that's why we look at the larva. We look for eggs, we look for immature larvae, the grubs, and we look for capped brood to tell us if there is a queen. You don't have to find the queen. You want to see evidence of the queen. So from start to finish, it takes 59 to 71 days, around two months for a colony who has either swarmed or decided to replace a queen or is raising a queen because you damaged her. It will take around two months for that colony to completely turn over and have the genetics of the queen that they raised. So this is one of our arguments for why you should purchase mated queens and not let your colonies raise their own queens because of the time, this is loss of production. So my club, a small group of members in my club, we decided to raise, to start this project after we saw Randy Oliver, the gentleman in the lower right hand corner, he spoke at a Missouri State Beekeepers meeting and said, you clubs, you know, you can do this, you just get stock from your members, the highest quality stock, raise queens, and then have those queens available for your club and your community so that beekeepers in the area don't have to go out of state, you know, to Georgia and Florida and California and have those queens mailed or shipped because of the damage, potential for damage and not being locally adapted. Dr. Harago Camilla is with SLU and at the time that I saw the presentation at the Missouri State Beekeepers meeting, Dr. Camilla was publishing his research, his survey research regarding bee diversity, native bee and honey bee density and diversity in St. Louis and apparently North St. Louis is second only to the Indiana Dunes area which is a natural preserve, it's not a residential area, but North St. Louis is pretty run down, there are a lot of industrial and residential buildings that are not being cared for and that is great habitat for bees, both honey bees and native bees because they are not being disturbed, they're not being, that area is not being treated with chemicals, they're untouched and so the bees do really well up there. So these two bits of information came together at kind of at the same time, someone in the club came to me and said, my buddy has space where we can do this in North County so we decided to do this project but we also decided on a specific location to take advantage of the feral drone stock, the males and the male cast. So we're raising queens, the queens go out and mate with drones in that area so keeping honey bees is, they're wild domesticated, so they're a little bit of both. We don't control who the queens mate with other than to put them in a specific location or to raise drones to kind of flood the area which is something that's on our list to do as well. This was just the research that Dr. Camilo published. So the goal of the project was to raise honey bee queens during the active season which is pretty short, it's April through July, to have those queens available for local beekeepers in our club and in the region. The proposed apiary plan, this was back in 2017, this is the location in Wellston. We chose the location as I said because there are very few managed hives in the area, the research as I described was favorable for this and it provided an opportunity for hands-on field work for our club members. So it was a large area, a yard that was gated that was safe for us to put hives there. So we defined our starter stock as overwinter disease-free and treatment-free and at the time these were buzzwords in beekeeping. So this is where we're starting to realize that the chemicals are creating problems, the bees are not getting healthier, the mites, which is the big test is developing resistance and so there was this push back in 15, 16, 17 to be treatment-free and so we had to define what that meant to our club. So those are our definitions. And this is what we did. So we had five, I think at the time we had 12 members that brought one or two of their colonies from their healthiest bees that were able to overwinter in our zone. We checked, we ran tests for mites and actually did some pathogen testing, which I'll talk more about. The number of beekeeping volunteers helped to manage these hives along with the people that were leading this and then they were assessed and put in queen ring boxes so that they could mate and they were harvested and then sold to members in the community. We started out using a number of queen ring techniques. We didn't land on one until we got the grant so we played around with swarm cells, cell punch on the spot and using a NICOT as well as grafting. Once we got the grant, we're only raising queens by grafting. So the project timeline was June to September and the other thing that makes us what we do different is that we're not rushing the harvesting of the queens. That's another area of research is that the large queen breeders are harvesting queens as soon as they start laying eggs and then they're putting them in a box called a queen cage and they go into dipause. So they stop laying until they are released by the beekeeper when the beekeeper purchased the queen and puts it in their hive. The lay seems to be messing with their pheromones and then the colony kills the queen because they determined she's inferior. So again, we're spending money on queens, we get them, we put them in their hive and the colony replaces her. So we, as part of our process, we are leaving the queen to lay in the mating box until her brood is capped. So not only are we letting her mature longer but we're identifying that she has healthy brood and that's what this image is. It's pretty good, solid brood pattern, all the same age, not a lot of skips. Anyway, so that's visually how we can identify the age of the queen and how long she's been laying. So we got, so we started the project and then, as I mentioned, Miranda Dusak, who is a customer of mine, she was living in St. Louis at the time and she reached out to me and said, you should apply for a Sarah Grant. I had no idea what that was and she was our sponsor. So we had a year of this under our belt when I wrote the grant then I knew exactly what we were doing because we had already been doing it for a year and I think that helped because I had never written a grant before. So we got the grant and what it really allowed us to do, two things, is buy a bunch of equipment because the problem is if you are successful in raising these queens, you need to have equipment, they're called mating boxes, to put them in. So you can be a great, you can get that skill down of grafting and raise a bunch of queens but if you don't have the equipment to put them in, they're useless. So the grant really allowed us to ramp up the equipment and yes, it is a lot of work but we did have fun at times and being part of a group, some people like to do one chore and some people like to do the other. So it's nice to have a group that everybody loves to paint but Chris did. This was our three frame mating nuke with a feeder. You see that we were able to invest in all the boxes that we would need for the upcoming several years. We built a shed to put all the equipment. That's the other problem with equipment is it's big and bulky and you need to put it somewhere. I don't know anybody, any beekeeper that doesn't have a shed or has a garage that they can't park in anymore. So this was the queen ring apiary in 2008. The parent colonies are in the back and the queen mating boxes that we painted all these different colors are in the front. We did do pathogen testing initially and that was again a big reason why I wanted to apply for the grant because this testing is expensive and again it's something that not the commercial breeders don't do this kind of testing. They test for mites, the mites vector disease. So in our philosophy you can have a colony that has a lot of mites but if they are resistant or in some way genetically immune to the mites you know if you kill the mites sometimes you lose that protection. I know it's a little bit into the genetics but we felt it was more important to actually look at the level of disease not just the number of mites in the hive and that's so we have worked with testing with DNA, pathogen load testing since the beginning and it is very expensive to do a full panel. We did have as you can see we had it was a weird shock that we had this much disease and what we thought were healthy colonies but a lot of this we don't see anymore so we know that we're breeding we're doing some natural selection I'm going to say. Okay so here's our grafting team we're able to use the landowners building just to go in and do this in the comfort of being able to sit down and not be in 100 degree weather then we're back outside building the cell builder this is where we put the cells we charge, supercharge this with feeding pollen and light syrup and we throw in a bunch of bees and let them raise a bunch of queens this is the original grafting timeline which is just a lot of work when you're doing this you really have to lay out a schedule and you have to adhere to the schedule if you have multiple queens emerging in a hive before you take them out they just kill each other that's what queen bees do is they sting each other until one survives and so you don't want to raise 25 queens and then have them all duke it out because you didn't pull them out of the finisher early enough our second grant so COVID was a disaster of course we lost a lot of people we had three people that hung in with it we raised probably 50 queens the first year maybe 90 the second year the second grant really allowed us to continue with the pathogen testing and get set up a resource yard that was 35 miles away so we continued to raise queens we grafted from several lines again from the pathogen testing we were able to select the colonies we were going to raise from and we had a second resource yard harvesting resources those resources to the queen mating yard and just as I described supercharging this colony to raise 20, 30, 40 queen cells that's what they look like so this is the middle of the year well this is at peak so we've got maybe 50 queens that are in these mating boxes in June and July so to review queens emerge from a cell they harden off in five days they need a few days for mating flight two to five days to ripen she begins to lay eggs that is capped in ten days and then we assess and again this is a picture of we would grade this queen highly this is probably a four or a five we mark harvest, grade and ID the queens to sell this is the pathogen testing just to say we have a little bit of five out of 15 pathogens in our yard but this lab has been quantifying this so that we can compare our numbers to low average and high and our numbers are all below average or average so we feel that we are successfully raising healthy queens to then sell to folks so the funding allowed us to have a complete picture of the health of our colonies by paying for the pathogen testing and that could direct our grafting we don't do any selection this is not, you know for always sensitive hygienic or low propolis or anything we only cull the colonies that are either mean or have a high mite load that we're afraid they're going to share mites with other colonies in the yard and that is there's a term for it now it's called black box bee breeding you're just removing the one you're culling the ones that don't meet your standard we grade the queens this is what we grade them on brood pattern, workability size of the queen, storage of resources veromite control, small high beetle control we sell it we ask the beekeepers we say you're going to get a survey from us you have to answer the survey so we know, you know if you like the queen or if you're getting what you think you're paying for and then I provide that information to Sarah this is what we did this year our production numbers we raised 124 mated queens we sold 84, sorry in 2023 we overwintered 24 nukes this year we're overwintering 40 nukes, those are the little boxes on top of the parent colonies they're getting the heat from the parent colony to help them survive the winter so we can sell those in the spring and our annual revenue in 2023 was $9,600 the queens on the left-hand side or at my store that's queens that we purchased from another supplier the queens on the right are the queens from our SSA yard so I just look at this picture and think the bees are telling me that they like our queens okay and this is for anybody who wants to get started you know I think I talk to a lot of clubs and I try to just inspire them to think about either doing this as individuals or doing this as a club sometimes the timeline and the equipment needs can be daunting but for anybody who wants to play around with this Randy Oliver has a great website there's so much information but go to this Queens for Pennies and you can start doing this for yourself and if you're successful in raising some queens maybe you raise more than you need you can start sharing them with people in your club or in your area I did want to mention I know I if anybody's interested I have copies of the pathogen testing if you want to see who's doing that work for us and if anybody's interested this is my new favorite book I don't have a picture up there but it's called raising resilient bees this is a great book