The rain finally let up just in time for us to begin grafting again—because when it’s time to graft, we graft. The queen’s calendar doesn’t wait for better weather.

After a few months off, it’s amazing how quickly the rhythm returns. Grafting is truly like riding a bike. Still, it always humbles me how small and delicate 24-hour-old larvae are. Their positioning in the queen cell is critical; a slight misorientation can cause the larvae to drown in royal jelly or fail to develop properly. With so many new team members observing grafting for the first time, it’s become something of a spectacle—but when the frame comes out of the hive, all questions pause. Our first priority is keeping those larvae viable.

This season, we’re using a new mother colony—an overwintered hive from one of our apiaries. Introducing new genetics is essential to preventing bottlenecks and maintaining colony health across our research network. Fortunately, this queen is laying beautifully, and the hive is strong. We had no shortage of graftable frames to choose from, which is always a great sign.

Given the slow start to the season and the modest size of our cell raiser, we’re starting with a small graft of 25. We’ll scale up as the weather improves and the colony gains strength. In the next day or two, we’ll return to check for cell development.

Here’s to a strong and productive queen rearing season ahead!

We officially kicked off our queen rearing season today by setting up the cell raiser. To prepare the colony, we introduced a queenless nuc with nongraftable larvae—ensuring the bees focus their efforts on raising the graft we’ll introduce tomorrow.

This marks our third season of queen rearing, and it’s exciting to enter it with more experience and confidence under our belt. Despite an unusually cold start to the season, we’re already seeing signs of drone comb production, and the beginning of mating season is just around the corner.

We didn’t need to move any cells out of the cell raiser because at this point we’re done grafting! The developed cells from graft nine yielded 25 mated queens. Of the 26 cells we put in, only ONE didn’t make it! We left those queens in their mating nucs so they will make more brood that we can use to help out troubled hives in the Boston region. And that was our queen rearing season!

In total, we reared 95 healthy queens who successfully mated, and we moved 35 of those locally reared queens to other regions. We are so excited to continue on this journey; the growth potential of this program is exponential. Hopefully soon, we won’t have to source any queens that we didn’t rear ourselves and be more sustainable and have healthier colonies overall!