Queen Isolation Cages (156)

Episode 156 – Queen Isolation Cages

Jim Tew: Hello, Honey Bee Obscura Podcast listeners. Jim Tew here with Dr. David Peck, preparing our segment for you on a stimulating discussion that I did not expect. Somebody else came up with the idea. You guess who? Queen Bee Isolation Cage. Before you ask, what is that? Please know we're going to explain it for you in detail. It's a very useful tool that Betterbee has made available to you, and Dr. Peck has had a lot to do with that.

Good morning, sir.

David Peck: Good morning. It's great to be here with you. This is going to be a fun conversation, I think.

Jim: I hope so, because as usual, I get to walk down memory lane. Hi, I'm Jim Tew.

David: Hi, I'm David Peck from Betterbee.

Jim: We're looking forward to talking with you here for the next 20 minutes or so about a useful device that can be a real attribute to your beekeeping enterprise.

Introduction: You are listening to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the folks behind Beekeeping Today podcast. Each week on Honey Bee Obscura, hosts Kim Flottam and Jim Tew explore the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honeybees in today's world. Get ready for an engaging discussion to delight and inform all beekeepers.

If you're a long timer or just starting out, sit back and enjoy the next several minutes as Kim and Jim explore all things honeybees.

Jim: David, I have to tell you, may I call you David?

David: Yes, absolutely.

Jim: I have to ask you that. It's kind of clumsy to say, Dr. Peck, and I call you David.

David: I think it would be pretty absurd for me to ask another doctor to call me doctor.

Jim: I'm long finished doctoring.

Speaker: It doesn't wear off, Jim. Once a doctor, always a doctor, whether we want to be or not.

Jim: I always dream that someone's going to come take it away from me after all these years.

David: You and I both wasted our 20s in grad school. We've got to have something to show for it, so it might as well be- [crosstalk] .

Jim: That's true. That's exactly right. Oh, my dad said, "Jim, you can't make a living with your hobby." Those words always hang on me now that I'm this old, and still trying to make a living with my hobby.

David: You've muddled through.

Jim: I have muddled through. David, you came up with the idea on this cage. I want you to describe it, and then I'm going to tell you my homemade experience, that I did all those years ago. Explain to us, sir, what a queen isolation cage is.

David: A queen isolation cage, as you say, I'm the one who suggested that we talk about it, but I didn't invent it. Betterbee didn't invent it, it's a longstanding product and an idea. What this is is basically a little cage. It's either the width of one frame or the width of two frames, and the walls of it are made out of queen excluder material. What that means is that I can put one frame, or two frames, however many fit into it, into this cage. I can put my queen in, and then guarantee that those are the only frames she's got access to, or I can leave my queen out, and I can guarantee that she can't get to the frames that I've locked up inside it. She is unable to come in or go out, but all the rest of the nurse bees and the workers, they're free to come and go as they please because the walls are just queen excluder.

It's a way for you as a beekeeper to very definitively say to your queen, these frames, they're off-limits, or more likely, these frames, this is all you've got access to, so you better make the best of it.

Jim: It's a queen bee prison, in a way?

David: That's one way to think of it, sure.

[laughter]

Jim: Why would you want to do that? There are several reasons that come to mind, but there are reasons that beekeepers would want to confine the queen to a specific frame or frames.

David: Right. I think that a lot of folks, the initial and natural instinct on this, and the reason a lot of folks have made them at home, is if you're trying to make new queens, if you're grafting, then the advantage of this is that you can put your frame in, put your queen in, then come back however many days later, so that you've got larvae that are all basically exactly the same age. You can go in and pull your grafts and take them out of that frame that was in the cage with the queen, and you say, well, look, she was only in here for but seven or eight hours, and so I know that all of those eggs were laid at the same time, so now all of these larvae are the same age, and my book says that my larvae need to be exactly this many days hatched, and so that means that that's the day I'll go in and do my grafting.

The other advantage of it is that I think it's short-sighted to view this just as a grafting tool, because a lot of beekeepers aren't going to get into grafting, and I think it's more useful than that. The reason the Betterbee is carrying it, it's not something that we first brought to the U.S. market. I think Walter T. Kelly used to sell a similar product, and then they stopped making and selling that before they got bought, but the idea here is simply to have your manufactured queen cage that lets you throw the queen in, take her out as needed.

In my graduate work, I used this for all sorts of experiments. I wanted to figure out how long certain bees from a survivor population spent underneath their brood caps. Was that any different than the bees that you could buy from a queen breeder? I set them up in here. Queen was only in there for three hours or four hours, and then I could go in and I could monitor, all right, this little batch of eggs that were laid in that four-hour window, when did they get capped? When did they emerge? It's a tool that you can use for a whole lot of different things.

What I like to say is that it's less like a smoker that only makes smoke, or like a hive tool that you can only use to pry stuff here and there. It's a tool that you can use for many different kinds of beekeeping projects.

Jim: That queen thing you discussed, it brings back really pleasant memories. I distinctly remember it was spot number four. You pull the frame out, that was day number one, and the eggs were going to hatch in about three days, and you wanted these really young larvae, almost just hours old. You had to be there, David, every day. If it was Thanksgiving coming up, or some holiday, July the 4th, and you thought, I'm going to take the day off, well, your graft box just went down the tube because this all screwed up.

It was so heavenly when I had been on the job, and you went out, and you could just go right to spot number three. You could go number four, and take that frame out, and everything on there was graftable larvae. There was no looking, no searching. Is this too old? Is this too young? Everything you saw was good to graft. Then you got to keep moving.

Now, if you're quitting grafting, if it was a one-time thing, that was great, but you probably didn't need the cage for that. It really worked well.

David: It lets you control the scheduling. For queen rearing, scheduling is everything.

Jim: That is perfect. Scheduling is everything. If you miss a day, the bees don't miss days. They're always on the money.

David: They're always working. They don't take holidays.

Jim: Yes, it's just beekeepers who miss days.

David: Right.

Jim: Keep going, sir. Keep going.

David: Sure. The grafting is cool. The grafting is great. If you're making a lot of queens, then I don't need to say anything else to convince you why it might be worth having. What a lot of folks have gotten excited about, what I've gotten excited about, is using these cages for varroa control. Because by putting your queen into a cage and then leaving her in there for a while, what you've done is you've said to her, all right, your brood nest used to be 20 frames, now it's 1, and this 1 frame is going to be the only game in town if you're a little varroa mite scurrying around trying to find some cell to run into and lay eggs.

There's all sorts of different recipes and formulas that you can use for when the queen goes in and when she comes out. Then do you pull the frame out once those very limited brood get capped, so that you can throw that into your chicken coop or your freezer? Do you allow those bees to grow up for a certain amount, and then you go and you hit them with a miticide? There's a lot of different tricks and manipulations that you can do if you're trying to use this to create either a broodless period, or some very limited brood that are going to be really valuable and desirable to those varroa mites.

I think it's a tool that beekeepers just haven't had available to us up to this point. How else do I force a colony right in the middle of a honey flow, right in the middle of brood rearing season to say, all right, can you girls just dial it back for a little bit? Can I just get you to fill up only this one frame for a couple of weeks, so that I can do this very clever mite manipulation that I've read about?

Jim: That's a very interesting concept. Give me just a second to think about it while we hear from somebody near and dear to your heart, our sponsor.

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Jim: I'm really glad you said once or twice that it's a tool, because as you were describing it, it's a tool. It's something in my bee management toolbox. If you've got something that I'm trying to accomplish, in this case varroa control, would you say frequently, sometimes, never, that that frame that's in the cage could be considered a bait frame, where you lure varroa to that frame, almost like you would do with drone cell foundation or drone combs?

David: Absolutely. I think that there are folks who are very happy to use this tool in exactly that way, to view that as sort of sacrificial brood, the purpose of which is to just vacuum up those mites from all the rest of the colony. If you time things right, and all of the other brood in that colony has emerged, all the stuff the queen was laying before she went into the cage, then when that frame full of larvae are getting capped, it's going to be the only game in town. There are folks who have even tried to supercharge this by putting that queen in there on the drone frame. Now you've got drone brood, and it's the only brood in the colony, so if you were a varroa mite, you'd be a fool not to take that offer. Of course, then you come out and into the freezer you go.

If you wanted to use drone brood in it, you would probably want to set yourself up with the two frame, or three frame, or four frame, however big you want it to be, version of this, because that two frame lets you give them a regular frame of worker brood, so the queen is still sending nice, regular worker brood signals to the colony, they're not going to start worrying about her. You can also give her that drone frame for her to fill up. Then each of those, or maybe only just the drones, you're going to pull out at the appropriate time, to trap and remove a lot of your mites.

Jim: When you were talking, I was thinking, are we raising bees, or are we raising mites? Because we're doing everything we can to get that queen to produce brood, to produce the most mites, so we can get rid of them. We are briefly in the mite rearing business. I'm saying that tongue in cheek, because we, beekeepers, I can't ignore varroa. I talk to people all the time who have techniques worked out, and don't treat, and their life goes on. My life does not go on. For me personally, in my bee yard, varroa takes me out. Kim would say, well, it's your old comb. I don't know what to blame it on, but I have to struggle with varroa. If I don't keep varroa under control first, then I'm unable to keep bees, secondly. That's just me.

David: Varroa management is a year-round project, and it does require constant intervention. Your bees can intervene. If you get bees that have some mite resistance traits, you can intervene using chemicals. You can intervene using a mechanical control, like one of these cages. There's a lot of different stuff that we can do. The more tools available, the better. That's why I was really enthusiastic when they said, hey, do you think we should offer this as a product? I said, absolutely. Because the alternative is, if a beekeeper wants to use something like this, and nobody sells it, then you've got to sit out in your garage and try to cobble something together. I know you've got some experience trying to do that, with mixed results, let's say.

Jim: Speaking of memories, I need to be clear here, David. I'm not trying to sell bees. I'm trying to talk about them. You can build your own, you should do that once, and get it out of your system.

[laughter]

Because it requires extremely careful measurement. I put saw kerfs on the ends of two new deeps, and then I used a kerf or a slot wide enough that the queen excluder would fit into that kerf that I had cut with a metal cutting blade, and a saber saw. It's got to be dead straight, dead perfect, dead tight, bee tight. One of the oddest things was the bottom of the thing was hard to do. You could get the sides of the cage in, but to secure the bottom with the queen excluder was troublesome.

Then the top. Because when you put the top on to close it off, you had bees in the way, and you had to brush them off. It was important to remember someplace in that cage is a frantic queen running around. When you pressed, in my case, what was a plywood cover down, be sure you didn't crush the queen under it. I love this cage. It was extremely useful for queen production. I can see where it would be useful for varroa production. I'm glad that anybody makes it just because you could build these things, but they were difficult and tedious to put together. That was my experience.

David: I've seen all sorts of different designs, either what you described, cutting slots in a box, and then sliding individual panels of excluder down, or folks who will even sort of cobble together, take a plastic excluder and some sheet metal, and sit out there with their tin snips, and try to put together a cage that looks sort of like the one that we're carrying now. It certainly doesn't look like a project I would enjoy. I think I get a lot of little metal cuts on my fingers.

Jim: They couldn't make any mistakes. I want to say that. You couldn't. The whole purpose, it has to be a queen tight prison.

David: Queen tight, but not bee tight, and i's got to represent and respect the bee space inside and out. That is a lot of very, very careful work.

Jim: Yes. I cut you off. Tell me what you were going to say.

David: I was just going to say that there is an alternative that folks can use, and I agree with you. We're here to talk about stuff, not to sell things. If you don't want to buy this thing, and you don't want to go out to your garage and make something, there is something you can do basically using material that you've probably already got. You can set yourself up, I've got my, let's say, double deep brood chambers. I'm going to go in with my third brood box.

Now I'm going to put in a third deep box, and I'm going to put a queen excluder at the bottom, and a queen excluder at the top. Let's say I'm using 10 frame equipment, I'm going to put eight frames of capped honey into that box. It's basically just dead space that still respects bee space, but it's not anything useful to a queen. Then I can put in one or two, or however many I choose, of my empty deep frames, and now I've got my queen sealed between queen excluder. The bees can come and go, but she's only got access to a couple of frames to lay on.

There are folks who have done things like that, and it can certainly work. The downside, I think, one of the major downsides there is by pulling that queen up and putting her into this brand new sort of excluder box that you've constructed, you've pulled her and her pheromones far, far away from the rest of the old brood nest. Now you're going to have bees down on the far side going, geez, I haven't smelled mom in a while. Maybe it's time to make a few queen cells. I'm a little nervous. Why don't we start this process?

I find if I do it that other way, the cheap and dirty way, then I've got to go down into the brood nest, and be inspecting for and cutting out queen cells very, very carefully. Whereas with these cages, you can set them right down in the existing brood nest, and the bees will walk around and say, well, it's funny, there's no brood over here, but oh, here's mom just right next door, and she's laying eggs, so I guess everything's all right. I think it gives you a little bit of an edge to be able to put your queen right down where she belongs. She just can't get out through those bars.

Jim: When you were talking, I'm thinking this is not elementary beekeeping.

David: It certainly isn't.

Jim: We're kind of in the second level, or either the third level of beekeeping because you've got to handle queens, you've got to find queens, you've got to cage queens, you've got to be timely. This is not something for someone who's got a full-time day job, and kids in school or something.

David: Absolutely not.

Jim: This is going to be a tedious demand.

David: And not something that I'm going to recommend to a beginning beekeeper. If you come in and say, I want to buy a brand new hive kit in my first package of bees, I'm going to hide these things behind me. I don't want you touching these cages for a while because it's just going to confuse, and upset, and confound you. For the new beekeeper, I think the best way to manage varroa is learn about miticides, learn how to use a few different miticides, and then talk to somebody about the schedule that they're using with miticide to control the parasites.

When you get to that more advanced level and you say, well, maybe I'll still use the miticides, but I want to dial back my use. This is a way to go in. It's a non-chemical method that can help you sort of do a little manipulation of that Varroa population early in the year. Then maybe you're only doing one or two treatments throughout the rest of the year. Of course, the other advantage you get is if I cage my queen up, and then there's no capped brood anywhere in the hive, except in this one special frame that I've had her laying on, then I take that frame out and throw it in my freezer, well, all at once I've got myself a colony with zero capped brood in it.

On that day, I can go and do an oxalic acid dribble, or a vaporization, or put in some hop guard, any of these things that are safe to use in a honey flow, and I can pop that right into my colony, and wind up with a very effective mite control intervention right smack dab in the middle of the honey producing season.

Jim: I'm sold.

[laughs]

The one thing I'd like to ask, not knowing you had this product, I saw that there's a double-frame cage, I believe. That's the largest you offer, isn't it, two frames?

David: Correct. The double frame is really based on work that's coming out of some of the labs in Europe where they're using this for specifically varroa control. We introduced the single deep frame, which is the only one I'd ever seen, that was the one that Walter T. Kelly used to make. That single frame cage, is handy for my research, it's handy for grafting, and it's got some value for varroa control. The double deep, I think, is more valuable.

Ralph Buchler's lab in Europe is providing some really exciting data about how you can trap your queen at just the right interval, put one frame of honey in, and one frame of brood, and then let her fill up that brood frame. Then you take out the honey frame, and you put in another brood frame, and you follow his calendar, and what you wind up with at the end is two batches of basically these trapped frames getting capped over as the mites are all running in. You pull those two frames out, and then you've released your queen partway through the process, and then you hit them with a miticide treatment, and for a little bit of fiddly work, but not all that much cost or time, you have wound up very, very aggressively knocking those mite populations down.

Jim: I understand what you just described, but I have a quirk that I would like to suggest. I like the double-frame thing, and the second unit I built was a double-frame, but I'm going to put one frame in. I was raising queens, and I liked the extra space. If I was producing queens from that queen, I didn't want to roll her up or crush her in that tight area, so I liked having the extra space. I would casually say, if you're a clumsy beekeeper, think about getting the double-frame unit, and then just using one frame in. The frame comes in and out easily. You don't roll the bees off, there's less danger to the queen.

David: If you're putting one frame in there, but it's for grafting, the queen goes in, the queen comes out, you go in and you pull that frame out, it's only a matter of maybe a week at most that you might need to have it installed. There might be a bit of burr comb built, especially if it's the middle of a honey flow, but as long as you can deal with that, you should be in pretty good shape.

I agree, even in my own research with the older-style frames, the ones that were kicking around Tom Seeley's lab that I was playing with, I will confess that I, too, have rolled a couple of queens that I really didn't want to roll. It can happen when you're working in tight quarters. Again, that was when I was a less experienced beekeeper, and it's part of why I don't recommend this for somebody just getting started. You've got to get your C legs under you, and your B legs under you before you go in and start messing around with a tool this powerful, but with this much complexity to it.

Jim: The great thing about it is you can take it out. Those boxes I built, you've got to take the whole box off. The whole box was the trap, and queen excluders were integral to it, and you just pull this thing out, put it away, and then you're back to a regular beehive.

David: Exactly, right. No propolis being packed into your kerf cuts that you then need to scrape out the next year or anything like that.

Jim: That's true.

David: Now, this is clearly not going to be something that most of your commercial beekeepers are going to leap on. If you're a beekeeper who's got 1,000 hives, you're not going in on day one, and taking queens out on day six, and pulling the brood out on day 14 or whatever your timing turns into. If you're a beekeeper who, like me, sort of enjoys the keeping, and enjoys working with the bees, and you've only got a backyard apiary that's got 1, 2, 3, 5, maybe up to 10 colonies, this is the kind of manipulation that you can manage. It's going to give you a lot of power to intervene, and manipulate that you just don't have if you can't lock your queen up with a couple of frames for however long you choose to lock her up.

Jim: I enjoyed talking to you about it. We need to let it go. I think we've made our points, but the next points are, how do you handle the queen? How do you farm the queen? How do you mark the queen? We just went straight to the cage. A lot has to happen before the cage is operational. Maybe some other time we could go into that, but I think the cage thing is a great idea.

I've said before, I used them when I had to build them. I love these things. I love using them. I enjoyed using them. You've got to decide if it's for you or not. Can we talk more about this, and these other subjects in the near future here? It's been very entertaining for me and educational.

David: Absolutely. It's always a pleasure to talk to you, and it's always a great pleasure to get to share cool beekeeping techniques with your podcast listeners.

Jim: Until next time, Jim Tew telling you bye, and to all our listeners who slick it out this far, thank you for hanging in there.

[00:23:47] [END OF AUDIO]