Episode 65: Queen Rearing Selection Criteria

Hi, I’m Stewart Spinks and welcome to Episode 65 of my podcast, Beekeeping Short and Sweet. I’m gearing up to start my queen rearing program at the end of this month and so I thought I’d go over my selection criteria and maybe this year we’ll get some fantastic new queens.

The books I refer to are available here:
Queen Bee: Biology, Rearing and Breeding by David Woodward
The Principles of Bee Improvement by Jo Widdicombe
( These are affiliate links which cost you no more than you would normally pay for the books but I get a very small commission should you choose to make a purchase).

There’s an old beekeeping saying that goes something like “A swarm in May is worth a load of Hay, a swarm in June is worth a Silver spoon and a swarm in July isn’t worth a fly”.

I guess the meaning of the proverb is the earlier the swarm the more productive they can be. That’s not to say July swarms can’t be built up and be ready for the following Spring but May swarms can easily grow into full sized colonies and give a super of honey if everything falls into place.

Thinking back to the proverb and swarms in May, I’m going to need a barn to put all that hay in because my bees have really been going for it this Spring.

I’m not complaining, I’ve managed to either split colonies or collect swarms and have reached my target number of colonies for the year with plenty of time still to come so it’s currently looking quite positive. It would be easy to get pessimistic with all the posts by beekeepers proclaiming they’re having the best Spring ever with no swarming and more honey than they’ve ever seen before but just remind yourself that these are the exception and if you’ve seen my latest videos on Patreon you’ll see how things can quickly go sideways.

I had lots of good intentions for a bumper Spring honey crop and certainly the bees on the oilseed rape have been doing a fine job, it’s just they also decided they wanted to take advantage of the early windfall of resources and get their reproduction in early and who can blame them. Those swarms now have really good chance of building up strongly to see out the Winter to come. I can’t believe I said Winter already, oh well, always looking forward.

And that brings me on to today’s topic of my queen rearing plans for this year and how I intend to select my colonies firstly for the queen mother colony, that’s the donor colony that will supply the young larvae that will become new queens. And then the equally important colonies that will supply the drones to mate with the newly emerged virgin queens.

I’ve got quite a number of queen rearing books now, some of them really quite old, but my two favourite books for queen rearing are David Woodward’s Queen Bee: Biology, Rearing and Breeding, this is my “Go To” book when I need to remind myself what the heck I’m supposed to be doing.

The second book is a relatively new book by Jo Widdicombe called The Principles of Bee Improvement and I particularly like the simple Five qualities for selection used in the book from the Bee Improvement Programme for Cornwall or BIPCO for short.

I’ll leave full details of the two books in the podcast notes beneath the podcast on my Patreon page if you’d like to take a look at them.

Looking back at my experiences this year so far, they haven’t much different from other years in that colonies will swarm but it’s been the cocktail of that very mild Winter, the early warm Spring weather, followed by a rather chilly period in early May that we are just coming out of.

I think all of this helped the bees decide to swarm and regardless of how many swarm cells I removed the bees were building them up again faster than I could tear them down. The result has been quite frantic. Like I said, it’s a positive outcome for me as I’m now filling brood boxes and nucs with bees I would otherw