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  "description": "Queenright queen rearing using the 'Ben Harden system' is an ideal way to produce queens without the need for huge cell raising colonies, or compromising honey production. A 'little and often' approach helps mitigate adverse conditions, and mistakes made when learning. Try it!",
  "path": "/how-to-queenright-queen-rearing/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-01T16:00:30.000Z",
  "site": "https://theapiarist.org",
  "tags": [
    "mini-nucs",
    "Subscribe now"
  ],
  "textContent": "How many bees does it take to rear a queen?\n\nUsing _nano-colonies_ , scientists have shown that as few as 100 bees can rear a new queen (Lamas _et al.,_ 2025). That's right, 100 nurse bees in a perforated plastic cup in an incubator, provided with a 12-hour-old queen cell (i.e., one that's _just_ been started), will rear the queen to emergence. There's no difference between the mating success of queens reared like this and those reared in a traditional cell builder {{1}}.\n\nHowever, if you read about methods employed by beekeepers you'll often see towering cell raising colonies recommended, consisting of two or three brood boxes packed with young and emerging brood. Following the addition of grafted 12-hour old larvae to the cell-raising colony, the resulting queens are reared until close to emergence, and then transferred to mini-nucs for subsequent mating.\n\nFor the small-scale, enthusiastic amateur, both of these methods are unachievable … and undesirable.\n\nThe nano-colonies, because you need a laboratory, considerable dexterity and the time to optimise the setup. The towering cell raiser, because it requires a _huge_ number of bees. If you've only got 2 or 3 colonies, establishing a double or triple brood box queenless cell raiser uses almost all of your stock.\n\nIrrespective of their scale, both these methods use _queenless_ colonies, and therefore the resulting queens are reared under what is termed the _emergency_ response.\n\n## Queenright queen rearing\n\nBut think about what happens in a natural colony — for example, one living in an old oak tree. The likelihood of the queen suddenly dying is very small. Nevertheless, the colony still needs to reproduce (swarm), and the queen must be replaced (supersedure) as she gets old and infirm.\n\nIn these situations, new queens are reared in the _presence_ of the existing queen.\n\nThe _swarming_ and _supersedure_ responses result in the production of new queens under _queenright_ conditions.\n\nIn addition to being queenright, these colonies are not abnormally large {{2}}.\n\nThe reality is that the majority of queens — in both free-living colonies and in thousands of 'managed' hives (in the absence of swarm control) — are reared under queenright conditions.\n\nBees have been around for millions of years, and queenright queen rearing has worked very well for them.\n\nAs I'll describe in this post, I think queenright methods are _ideal_ for the small-scale amateur beekeeper who wants to rear a few queens for their own apiary, or for friends.\n\nThis is a long post (~5,000 words) covering both the principles and practice of queenright queen rearing, together with the tips and tricks that make the difference between success and failure. Access is for sponsors (paying subscribers) of __The Apiarist__.\n\nSign up as a paid subscriber\n\nThese methods require minimum amounts of specialist equipment, all inexpensive (or easy to build), and can be successfully employed using a _single_ hive. The method can be repeated, producing a trickle of queens over several weeks or months, with minimum disruption to the normal activity of the hive.\n\nBeekeepers often have to choose between making bees or honey … queenright queen rearing is about as close as you can get to achieving both 😄.\n\n### This post is for subscribers only\n\nBecome a member to get access to all content\n\nSubscribe now",
  "title": "How to : Queenright queen rearing",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-02T10:23:57.338Z"
}