New Zealander Henry (Harry) Cloake was a successful and widely known beekeeper, who grew his family beekeeping business into one of the dominant beekeeping enterprises in New Zealand. He shared his beekeeping insights with many, including world-renowned queen rearer and honey bee breeder Sue Cobey, who publicized his queen rearing methods widely in the United States. Her articles and talks introduced many beekeepers to the Cloake board. In this article, we will outline what a Cloake board is, and how and why it is used to rear queens.
Where do new queens come from?
A bee colony, left to its own devices, will often raise queens and attempt to swarm at some point each year. This natural process produces a small batch of very high-quality queens (though all but one are usually killed by the virgin queen who will ultimately take over the hive!). If a beekeeper wants to rear one or more batches of queens from a hive, we must give the bees all the cues and conditions that they need to make similarly high-quality queens, while also meddling in the process to keep nature from running its course.
A beekeeper who wants to raise queens wants all of their queens to survive and usually wants to produce multiple batches of queens using the same hives and bees. If the queens are meant to be sold, they also have to be ready when your customers need them. All of this increases the need for a queen rearing method that reliably produces batch after batch of high-quality queens.
Summarized guide on raising queen bees
There are many different methods to raise queens. Queen rearers throughout history and around the world have developed and altered methods to suit their particular needs. The diversity of methods means that it's hard to summarize the "typical" process, but a rough outline of usual queen rearing methods may be helpful here.
- To make queens, a beekeeper will usually graft a batch of very young female larvae out of worker cells, and into artificial wax or plastic queen cups. There are various grafting tools available to do this, but any tool that safely moves a larva into a queen cup will work.
- Once the larvae are in the cups, they are placed into a queenless hive, where the nurse bees will feed the young larvae to turn them into a batch of young queens. This queenless "cell starter" colony is strongly motivated to raise a queen, but they often struggle to feed all of the new emergency queens adequately.
- Therefore, once the queen cells have been started, the beekeeper moves the frame of cells into a queenright hive, the "cell finisher," where they are fed until they are capped.
- After the cells are capped, each one is moved from the cell finisher to its own personal mating nuc.
- In these nucs, a small number of workers will take care of the queen cell until the queen emerges, matures, mates, and begins laying eggs. At this point, the queens can be caught, marked, caged, and sold to beekeepers across the country.
In short, queen breeders generally try to produce high-quality queen cells by starting them in a queenless colony that is distraught about their lack of a queen, and then finishing them in a queenright colony where they will be fed and cared for by an organized colony with plenty of resources and young nurse bees.
Facts about the Cloake board
The Cloake board is a simple device that elegantly offers a surprising amount of control to a queen rearer. In essence, the board is a queen excluder bound in a wooden frame with a metal (or sometimes plastic) sheet that can be inserted above it to block the passage of bees through the excluder. The framed excluder can be installed above the bottom brood box in a hive and below the upper brood box.
By inserting the dividing sheet, the bees in the top and bottom boxes are separated from each other, meaning that one queenright colony can be turned into two colonies: a queenless cell starter above, and a queenright colony below. But when the sheet is removed again, the colonies are reunited into one queenright colony, which will serve as an excellent cell finisher.
In this way, the Cloake board allows one hive to serve both roles in a typical queen-rearing process.
Using the Cloake board to rear queens
Before grafting larvae into queen cups, the hive manipulations for queen rearing begin. The two-story hive that will raise the queen cells should be rotated 180 degrees, so that the entrance faces the opposite side of the hive than the returning foragers are used to. For now, that entrance should be closed or plugged up. At the same time, the Cloake board (without the slide) should be installed between the boxes, with the opening in the Cloake board facing the same way as the original orientation of the entrance. This will cause the returning foragers to pour into the Cloake board entrance with their resources.
During these manipulations, the young open brood should be moved from the bottom box into the top box, while confirming that the queen remains below the excluder and in the bottom box. The open brood in the top box will attract the attention of the colony's nurse bees, who will be needed to feed the grafted larvae. The bottom box should contain frames of honey, capped or emerging brood, and empty comb for the queen to lay in, but no open brood that will distract the nurses you are trying to concentrate in the top box.
The day before grafting, the slide should be inserted into the colony, and the original bottom entrance should be opened. This will produce a queenright colony on the bottom and a queenless colony on top, with a wealth of young nurse bees and lots of food resources in the top box. (Feeders and frames of stored resources can be added to provide even more food for the new queens.) Any remaining open brood in the top box is usually moved to another hive while shaking the nurse bees to leave them in place, so that the nurse bees in the queenless top box will have nothing else to divide their attention. You may want to leave a space for tomorrow's frame of grafted queen cells at this time, though a strong colony may start filling the gap with new comb by the time you install the graft.
On grafting day, bring your frame of grafted future-queens to the hive and let them gently "float" down into the queenless top box through the sea of workers that should be filling the gap in the frames. (If the space for the frame of cells is not filled with bees at this point, the colony will likely not be populous enough to raise a full batch of plump queen cells.) As you leave the apiary, the queenless workers in the top box will eagerly feed the grafted larvae royal jelly and begin their development into queens.
The next day, return to the hive. Remove the slide that divides the two colonies, and the bees will happily merge again into one queenright colony. The rear (original) entrance can be closed at this time, to keep the foragers focused on the entrance created by the Cloake board. The nurse bees will remain with the queen cells, feeding them, until they are capped. The queen in the bottom box cannot move through the excluder, and so cannot bother the queen cells in the top box.
Once the queen cells are capped on day 4 or 5 after grafting, they can be very gently and carefully moved to another holding colony to keep them warm and safe until they are moved into mating nucs on around day 10 after grafting. This holding colony or nursery colony must be very strong, and the cells must be protected from the resident queen by being on the other side of the queen excluder (or safely installed in a frame isolation cage). Meanwhile, the colony with the Cloake board can be rearranged as described above to prepare it for another set of grafted queens the next day!
By rotating brood and inserting and removing the sliding divider in the Cloake board, one hive can be continuously worked as a "queenless starter" and a "queenright finisher," providing the perks of both, without the behavior of the bees becoming deranged by long periods of apparent queenlessness.
Further reading is strongly recommended before attempting to raise queens using the Cloake board, since queen producers around the world have accumulated decades of tips and tricks for producing the best queens using this method. Among the many resources available, articles by Sue Cobey are highly recommended, such as the "Cloake Board Method of Queen Rearing and Banking."
Is queen rearing right for me?
The Cloake board system offers all the perks of starting new queens in a queenless colony, and also the perks of rearing queens in a queen-right colony. But the leap from beekeeping into rearing queens isn't one that every beekeeper wants to take. A brand new beekeeper shouldn't be messing with queen rearing until they've worked out the basics of keeping their hives happy and healthy through the seasons.
For many beekeepers, the only queens they'll ever "rear" are frames with swarm cells that they pluck from a large hive and put into a queenless split, in the hopes the split will requeen themselves when the swarm cell(s) are mature. This is perfectly respectable for the small-scale beekeeper, and the queens they produce are usually well-fed and high quality.
But for the brave few who want to try manufacturing queens, rewards await if you can give the young queens what they need. To rear batches of high-quality queens you need healthy bees, plenty of food, a steady hand, and the ability to design and stick to a very rigid schedule based on queen development. (If you'd like to know more about queen rearing, our annual hands-on queen rearing workshop fills fast!)
The Cloake board offers just one method for queen rearing, but it is a handy tool for the beekeeper who wants to make high-quality queens while maximizing how much they can get out of each hive.
