How to : Queenright queen rearing

How many bees does it take to rear a queen?Using nano-colonies, scientists have shown that as few as 100 bees can rear a new queen (Lamas et al., 2025). That's right, 100 nurse bees in a perforated plastic cup in an incubator, provided with a 12-hour-old queen cell (i.e., one that's just been started), will rear the queen to emergence. There's no difference between the mating success of queens reared like this and those reared in a traditional cell builder {{1}}.However, if you read about methods employed by beekeepers you'll often see towering cell raising colonies recommended, consisting of two or three brood boxes packed with young and emerging brood. Following the addition of grafted 12-hour old larvae to the cell-raising colony, the resulting queens are reared until close to emergence, and then transferred to mini-nucs for subsequent mating.For the small-scale, enthusiastic amateur, both of these methods are unachievable … and undesirable.The nano-colonies, because you need a…