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New(ish) Beekeeper Column
Stacking the Odds in Favor of VSH
By: Richard Wahl
Previous Month Recap
In last month’s article, “Raising VSH Queens”, I moved beyond the label and explained the traits of Varroa Sensitive Hygienic (VSH) queens and colonies; then continued with why those traits matter in your apiary, not just as a paper label. We looked at practical ways small-scale beekeepers can evaluate colonies and start propagating the genetics that are truly doing the work in the hive. This month, I am building on that framework by tackling two often-overlooked forces shaping the results: drone influence and queen grafting. When you manage how your drones and queens are chosen, you stop just identifying VSH traits and start intentionally spreading them across your apiary.
Drones, the Other Half
Queen rearing conversations often obsess over grafting and splitting techniques while ignoring drones altogether. I feel that’s a mistake. Half of your queen’s genetics come from drones, and if those drones do not carry VSH traits, you are watering things down before you ever begin. Prior to raising queen cells, your best VSH colonies should be encouraged to produce drones. That means resisting the urge to cut out drone comb, and timing your queen rearing to coincide with drone maturity. Drones take roughly two weeks after emerging to reach sexual maturity, so planning backward matters. That is roughly 40 days after the drone egg is laid, dependent on a number of environmental factors. Flooding the mating area with VSH drones doesn’t require exact timing, but it does require planning ahead. Even open-mated queens can show strong VSH characteristics when the local drone pool is heavily based on drones carrying VSH traits.
Once drones leave the hive they fly to established drone congregation areas (DCAs). These are loosely defined places where drones from many colonies gather day after day. Mature drones do not mate very near their home colony. DCAs are typically a few hundred yards to a couple of miles from home hives, often 10 to 40 feet above the ground, and shaped by landscape features like tree lines, slopes, or open clearings. Queens fly to these same areas on their mating flights, passing through clouds of waiting drones rather than seeking out any one colony. Mating occurs in flight, quickly with any number of luckily available drones. The queen visits multiple DCAs and returns to her home colony before making several flights on subsequent days, returning to the same or additional DCAs.
No DCA truly “belongs” to a single apiary. Your carefully raised VSH drones are mixing with drones from feral colonies, neglected backyard hives, as well as operations you may not even know exist, and it cuts both ways. It means you cannot fully control mating outcomes, but it also means you can have an influence over them. By saturating the area with drones from your best colonies, the odds are in your favor. You are not going to eliminate outside genetics, but you have the chance of overwhelming them. Successful queen rearing at the small-scale level is not about isolating queen and drone genetics; it is about stacking the deck in your favor before the queen ever leaves your bee yard.
Back to the Queens
Raising VSH queens starts with setting the bees up to succeed, so begin with the genetic blueprint you want repeated. Evaluating a queen begins with observing her colony rather than the queen herself. The brood pattern is a primary indicator. A strong queen produces a tight, uniform brood pattern with minimal skipped cells. Consistent egg laying with single eggs centered in cells, and a steady buildup of population all point to good reproductive health. Colony temperament, honey production, disease resistance, and overwintering success also reflect queen quality, as these traits are largely influenced by her genetics. Mite resistance and low mite counts are also a strong factor in determining a breeder queen. Her age is another factor as most queens perform best in their first one to two years, after which productivity and pheromone output may decline. Before we get to grafting, if you are making a split with a starter nucleus colony (nuc), include frames heavy with eggs, young larva, and capped brood. This will ensure a strong population of nurse bees and a steady supply of royal jelly for any potential queen cells.
From your best traits colony, select a couple of frames and identify cells with the smallest larvae. By carefully scraping away the lower edge of the chosen cell and a few adjacent cells below, you give the bees room to draw out proper queen cells that encourages them to focus their efforts on raising new queens. I have also had success with scraping the bottom of three day old eggs as my starter queen cells. An egg on its first day is standing vertical, on its second day lying horizontal and by its third day should be lying in a pool of shiny royal jelly. Spacing starter cells a few inches apart allows them to be caged later. With good timing one nuc can initiate several viable queen cells across multiple frames whose queens can then be distributed to additional starter nucs as those cells emerge.
Calendar awareness is critical from this point forward. Queen cells are capped quickly and around day ten or eleven, after your scratching of selected smallest larvae cells, push-in cages can be used to prevent emerging queens from killing each other. Caging also makes it possible to stagger queen emergence and move newly emerged queens to additional nucs, thus effectively multiplying queen acquisition from a single split. This approach does not compete with commercial grafting for mass queen production, but that is not the point. For the small-scale beekeeper it presents an efficient way to preserve desirable VSH traits. It dramatically increases the odds of ending up with a standout queen, or several, from a colony that has already proven its worth, while a split also reduces the colony’s urge to swarm.
Grafting Queens
Eight or nine years ago I made my first attempt at grafting queens. The day before grafting, I removed three brood frames from a hive and placed them into a five-frame nuc set over an open screened bottom box. A fourth frame contained nectar and pollen stores, while the center frame contained twenty plastic queen cups mounted on wood strips. I placed a drop or two of honey in each of those queen cups to encourage the bees to clean them out the day before grafting. The grafted cups placed on a frame would be placed in the nuc the next day. In the screened bottom box, I placed a soaking-wet sponge to provide both a water source and ventilation. It was a hot June day, so this setup helped keep the confined bees cool while they spent the night without a queen. My thinking was that a brief period without a queen would prime the nurse bees to produce ample royal jelly in support of the grafted cells introduced the following day. I have since learned that it does not take much more than an hour or two without a queen for the bees to start the process of queen rearing if day old larva and space to construct a queen cell exists. I have also found that grafting can be accomplished much earlier in the year if done in a heated room or warm pickup truck cab. In that case a damp sponge or wet paper towel on the bottom for a water source overnight is all that is required negating a need for a screened bottom on cooler late Spring or early Summer days.
The next morning, with queen cups cleaned of the honey, I proceeded to graft twenty very smallest larvae into those plastic cups. I selected two frames heavy with eggs and newly hatched larvae from adjacent colonies with desirable traits to graft from. I used a Chinese grafting tool to lift the day old larva from the parent frame’s cells. Since queens generally lay eggs in ever increasing patterns it is easy to spot day old larva next to eggs lying on their sides in shiny royal jelly. Using a pair of optic enlargers may assist in this effort. The Chinese grafting tool is a pen-like device with a thin, plastic flexible tip designed to slip under a larva and allow it to be removed as it floats on a bit of royal jelly. There are other devices used for the purpose of gathering larva that work just as well. Once lifted from the cell, a Spring-like plunger deposits the larva when placed at the bottom of a queen cup. It is important to lift the larva without rolling it in the royal jelly. At this stage, larvae breathe through a single spiracle on one side, and rolling them can prove to be fatal.
I was slow and clumsy during my first attempts so I kept a warm, damp towel nearby to cover completed cups to prevent them from drying out. My skill at grafting has quickly improved with each subsequent attempt. With two, ten cup frame strips completed, I placed them in the nuc and opened the nuc so bees could resume normal foraging. I provided one to one sugar syrup to ensure the nurse bees had an adequate food source as they built out what I hoped would be numerous queen cells. At this point close attention to calendar dates is a must.
Queen development does not care about the weather forecast, your work schedule, or how good the graft looked under the magnifier; it runs on a fixed biological clock. From the day of grafting, every step is predictable. A queen requires sixteen days from egg to emergence. Since the larvae selected had already spent three days as eggs and a day as a developing larva I subtracted that time and closely watched the calendar. Two or three days after the grafting, I checked to see if any of my queen cups were being extended into queen cells. I found ten of the twenty cups being drawn into queen cells. I was pleased with a 50% success rate on my first grafting try. At about day nine (five days after the graft) I checked to see that the cells were capped. From this point until nine or ten days after the graft it is important not to disturb or shake a developing queen cell. Since the queen is maturing at a much faster rate than the workers, which take twenty-one days to emerge, any jostling of the queen cell between five and nine to ten days after the graft could be detrimental to the queen’s development. At nine to ten days after the graft, the queen cell can be moved to a mating nuc anticipating queen emergence and subsequent mating flights. If the beekeeper intends to sell virgin queens they can also be placed in cages to be sold in a matter of days. It is recommended to keep virgin queens caged for no more than three to seven days or they begin to lose viability and their chances of successfully mating.
The following table summarizes key queen rearing dates:
– Day 1: Egg is laid.
– Day 3: Set out nuc with brood frames and prime the cell cups with honey or royal jelly.
– Day 4 (Grafting Day): Graft from no more than day old larvae.
– Day 6-7 (2-3 days after graft): Check if cells are being fed and drawn out by the nurse bees.
– Day 9 (5 days after graft): Check on number of cells capped by this point.
Days 10-13: Do not shake or disturb cells as queen is rapidly developing in the cell.
– Days 13-14 (9-10 days after graft): Move capped cells to mating nucs or place in cages before they emerge.
– Day 16 (12 days after graft): Queens emerge.
It is important to separate the individual queen cells into their own nucs or cages before emergence. If multiple queens emerge, the first will seek out the other cells and kill competing queens before they have a chance to emerge. If queen cells are moved to individual mating nucs ensure the cell building colony has an ample supply of nurse bees to support the new queen and the first eggs that become larva that must be kept warm and fed. Use different paint colors on nucs, a zig-zag set out pattern for numerous nucs, varying heights and avoidance of over-crowding in straight rows to better facilitate recently mated queens returning to their own starter nuc after mating.
To Summarize
Stacking the odds in favor of VSH is not about labels or mastering a single technique; it is intentional preparation at every step. By recognizing drones as half the genetic equation and deliberately flooding the local mating area with drones from proven VSH colonies, the small-scale beekeeper can influence open mating outcomes. Start queen rearing with strong brood populations, select the youngest larvae or three day old eggs, and understand the bees’ biological calendar. Give nurse bees the resources and timing they need to raise high-quality queens. Whether working with carefully scratched starter cells or trying grafting for the first time, the principles remain the same. Choose breeder colonies that already have a good reputation, plan backward from fixed developmental timelines and avoid shortcuts. You may never fully control what happens beyond the hive, but with forethought and planning you can tip the balance in your favor by turning chance actions into the probability of steadily spreading VSH traits that perform where it matters; that is, the bees doing much of the work inside the colony. Honey bee queen evaluation and propagation are central to maintaining productive, gentle, and resilient hives. Self-sustainable beekeepers pay close attention to both the quality of the queen and methods used to reproduce her genetics across an apiary. Give queen evaluation and reproduction a try and you may be surprised by the improved traits you instill in your apiary.
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