Bulk Box Queen Rearing

This is a semi load of bees, three pallets high of double deeps, two pallets across.  That is a lot of bees!  They are coming back to our secret desert location from the almonds in California.
   Of course, we didn't start our work on this load of bees.  We'll let them rest, and work today in a yard of bees that came back last week.  We need bees, and lots of them, to make our baby queens this year.  I am learning a new method, the bulk box method of starting queen cells.
   The bees are in the bottom boxes, and we need them in the top box, so we reverse hive bodies, and place a fume board on top to drive the bees, and especially the queen, out of the top box which now contains the brood.  So now, the bees are in the bottom box with the brood in  the top box.  We place a queen excluder between the two hive bodies.  The bees will come back up to cover the brood, but the queen will be left below.  Tomorrow we will come back to collect our bulk bees.
   In another yard of bees, one that did not go to California, we go to make our cell builders.  The reason we want bees that didn't go to California is that we are going to use the brood from these boxes, rather than just the bees, and the chemicals used in the almonds are not good for the brood, and will also be contained in the pollen.  We want good strong bees, healthy nurses to take care of our babies.  The bees in this yard are not super strong yet, and we need four frames of capped brood to make our cell builders.  So, we take one frame of capped brood from each hive, using four colonies to build one cell builder. 
   An empty hive body is placed atop the strongest hive out of the four on a pallet above a queen excluder, and the four frames of capped brood are added to this box, along with honey, bee bread, and drawn comb. The reason we want only capped brood and not open brood, is that open brood would be a distraction to the nurse bees.  We want our nurse bees concentrating on feeding our baby queens.  These are also left overnight to collect nurse bees from the colony below.  We'll collect them and move them to a distant yard tomorrow.  We use a distant yard so that the bees won't drift to queen-right colonies.  This is especially important for the bees in the bulk box who will have no brood other than our queen cells for the first day.  The first day of queen rearing is always the easiest.  We get home early and enjoy something cold.  Good thing, as it is 100 degrees on this day, and later in the afternoon, the wind starts blowing at about 45 miles per hour, with gusts to 75.  In case you are wondering, a bee suit at one hundred degrees is a little hot.  It is important to remember to wear a bandana around your head to keep the sweat from running in your eyes.
    Intriguing, right?  This is a little like a good mystery.  We are left wondering how everything fits together, and how it will all work out.  Stay tuned tomorrow for step two of bulk box queen rearing!  T