Queen-rearing calendar

Plan your queen rearing day by day. Enter your grafting date and the calendar works out when the cells are sealed, when they should be moved, when the queens emerge and when you can expect laying.

How to use the calendar

1. Choose the date you plan to graft – or, if you confine the queen in a cupkit frame, the day the egg is laid.
2. The wheel and the list fill in with a date for each step. Day 1 is always the day the egg is laid.
3. Tap Print for an A4 sheet to pin up in your honey house, or Add to calendar to get reminders on your phone.

🐝 Tip: start rearing when you see capped drone brood in your colonies – then the drones will be sexually mature in time for mating. Read more about drones

Why do the days matter so much?

A queen develops from egg in 16 days – faster than both workers (21 days) and drones (24 days). Anyone grafting therefore has to keep to the timings: the larva must be no more than a day old, the cells must be left undisturbed during pupation and go into mating nucs before the first queen emerges. If a queen emerges on the cell bar frame, she will readily kill her sisters.

Don’t forget the drones

A queen mates only during a few days of her life, roughly 5–7 days after emerging. There must be sexually mature drones in the area at that time. A drone emerges only 24 days after the egg is laid and becomes sexually mature about 10–14 days later – so drones need a longer lead time than queens.

• Our rule of thumb: we start rearing queens as soon as we see capped drone brood in the colonies.
• More precisely: when the drone pupae in the capped cells have purple eyes, you can graft – the drones will then be mature at about the same time as the queens make their mating flights.

Want to read more? See our guide How to introduce a mated queen.