I’m back in Boston! I conduct our eighth graft on my own. This graft we decided to go back down to only doing 30 cups, because we were having those issues earlier with other, non-Best Bees queens infiltrating our cell raisers. In the cell raisers from the seventh graft, there were 17 developed cells. When we went to the apiary to visit the mating nucs and put those developed queen cells in, we caught 15 mated queens from graft six.
July 7th, 2023
July 7, 2023
BY Bridgette Whalen,
Bridgette Whalen started beekeeping in 2016 when she was studying at Roanoke College. In February 2022, she joined The Best Bees Company and moved to Boston. Bridgette is a level 2 beekeeper currently taking the Cornell Master Beekeeping Course to attain a Master Beekeeper Certification. She is the Boston Lead Beekeeper – the person who new beekeepers come to when they first come to Best Bees to learn how to beekeep, and also someone to call when a beekeeper is seeing something in the field that they haven't seen before. She conducts data analysis of the colonies we tend to make sure they are up to the best practices and promote bee health.
More Stories
April 14th, 2025
We officially kicked off our queen rearing season today by setting up the cell raiser. To prepare the…
April 24th, 2025
Graft 2 is officially underway. Today, we introduced 30 larvae into queen cups—a slight increase from the previous…