Miller Method

Dr. C. C. Miller Method of Raising Queens

Every beekeeper should raise a few queens. Do it for the experience. It is not hard.   It is even nice to have a queen available if you need to replace a queen.

Our suggested method: The Miller Method

Requires no grafting experience

Will produce fine queens

First, you will need to make some preparations. You will need a separate queen nuc box for each queen to be raised, a nuc box to build cells, and a good number of worker bees to build and feed the cells to be created.   You will also need an egg source. Hopefully, you have an outstanding queen producing good gentle bees with some mite tolerance.

Steps:

Place a frame of new foundation into the hive that has your queen source (This is your mother queen).   This frame is just a regular frame nothing fancy. The comb is cut into "V's". The only thing I would suggest is to place the frame between two frames of brood.   See the pictures:

This is day one. The picture to the right is a frame -- not even complete at that. It has no bottom bar but your frame could. It really doesn't make any difference. It has new thin wax foundation --- the type used for comb honey production but again that is not important. It could be brood foundation. This frame is placed in the hive with your Mother Queen. The mother queen will lay eggs in the cells the worker bees build on the new wax foundation. Queens seem to prefer to lay in this new comb. Notice that the foundation has been cut into "V" shapes. Again at this point this is not really critical.

Approximately One Week Later
The frame will look like this

The bees will have drawn out the comb into worker cells. The queen will have started laying eggs into the cells. You can see the eggs by looking down into the cells but because they are white and the comb is very bright yellow, it may be difficult at first. Eggs will look like little grains of white rice. Remember eggs hatch in three days. So if you see eggs, they are from one to three days old already. You will now need to get your cell builder hive ready. The cell builder hive-- In Miller's words, "The next thing is to find the right kind of bees to start the cells, not only to start them, but to take the very best care of them." The kind of bees he was referring to were bees that were already building queen cells -- as in hives building swarm cells. In this hive, Miller would destroy all queen cells and remove the queen and the frame she was on. He would then take the frame of comb with the eggs from the mother queen (a superior queen by the way), and insert that frame into the space occupied by the frame the queen was on.

Often in summer, it is difficult to find bees building queen cells and a person will need to create the conditions under which the bees will build queen cells. That method can be adapted to the Miller method.

Several frames of brood, and frames of honey and pollen and a lot of young bees are placed into a single deep super..   It could be placed in the same location as your mother hive (you would need to turn the mother hive around so that the entrance faces in another direction).

You will need to provide an ample amount of sugar syrup for the bees to fed on.

This cell builder hive must be queenless.

After three days, the bees will have started emergency queen cells. To prevent one of these queens from emerging and killing the queens you are trying to raise, it will be necessary to cut any started queen cells (these are called emergency cells) in the cell builder.

To this hive you would add the frame of eggs from your mother hive just like Miller suggest above.

Miller suggested cutting the comb with eggs in a saw tooth fashion as illustrated to the right. Again in Miller's words, "For a little distance at the edge, the comb contains eggs only. This part is trimmed away, leaving the youngest of the brood at the edge of the comb. One reason for this is that, other things being equal, the bees show a decided preference for building on the edge of a comb. Another reason is that I decidedly prefer to have cells on the edge, thus making them easier to cut out when wanted."

Cut the cells as shown in the picture above. Cut away the lower cells. The most important point I can make here is to emphasize the importance of having either eggs or very young larva near where the cuts are made.

   On day 10 the queen cells should look like those in the picture to the left..

It is now necessary to decide how many queens you want to raise.   You will need a nuc box for each queen to be raised and enough bees and feed to help her survive.   If you want only one queen you really don't need to do anything more.   The bees will build a number of queen cells -- Often 10 to 20. One of these queens will survive the battle among the queens that emerge.

Beautiful queen cells ready to be put into nuc boxes and raised for future queen are the result. Since queen cells raised in this fashion are built close together and often connected as shown in the picture, it is not possible to move all of the cells to a nuc. One could cut between these cells and save three of them. The three cells could then be placed in individual nuc boxes. A queen nuc box is nothing more than a small queenless hive having three to five frames..

From the day the eggs are laid by the queen and the bees begin to provide special attention to raising queen cells, a period of 16 days will pass before the new queens emerge. It will take another 10 days for virgin queens to mate and start to lay eggs of their own. We wish you happy queen rearing.