This second week of January brought our first cold weather of the winter season here in Florida. As the bees hunker down in clusters during cold nights, we are in the midst of the beginnings of blueberry pollination, which for us entails gathering and moving 80 hive lots of bees into blueberry bogs during early mornings. We are also preparing our first semi-load of bees to leave this weekend for Modera, California for almond pollination.

     It’s also time to start accumulating bees here at home for our cell builder yard. We will be spending time each week describing the tasks involved in grafting and we will try to bring it as alive to you as we can in a limited medium of print. We’ll also try to get some more up to date video on the webpage as we know there is a lot of interest in how we graft queen cells and raise and ship queens all over the country for new beekeepers, as well as seasoned veterans of the bee industry, who are busy making splits for their own pollination endeavors.

     The hives that are headed to California are double-deeps, just like the hives that we will bring in to the cell yard. In both cases, they must be strong and healthy hives. The hives going to California must consist of at least 8 fully occupied frames of bees. The hives coming home to the cell yard really need to be twice that strength. The bees going to California will be placed in almond orchards by Lyle Johnson and while Lyle will keep an eye on them, they really have to self-sustain until we see them again in March. The bees here at home that will be used as cell builders will be managed in such a fashion as to keep them on the threshold of swarming for the next 6-8 weeks. This is necessary to make the bees desirous to grow new queen cells. We will spend more time at a later date describing how we fool them into believing they need to raise a new queen. Because of the cold temperatures and short days, this is the most difficult time of the year to make the bees desire to raise queen cells. It is also one of the most important times because of the need for early queen bees that our industry has developed over the past decade.

     Our whole crew is here now and we are all excited to get started. We will let you know next week how the weekend went and how our first picketing of our queen mothers faired.