Swarms’ production
Each year, we produce 1000 overwintered swarms.
Those swarms are almost all produced on 6 frame hives. The hives provide us the necessary of bees to fill the Kieler nuclei.
In March, which is also the start of spring, we open all the hives to check the sanitary conditions and to estimate the reserves. We note the colonies’ strength (strong, medium or small) and we feed them, if necessary.
The following nights, we move the hives depending on their vigorousness to homogenize the apiaries.
Right at the beginning of the colza blossoms, we start the colonies’ dividing up on 5 or 6 frames.
- We let the queen with 2 sealed brood frames + 1 reserve frame + 2 building frames + 1 warm partition. The dividing up is made during the nectar flow. The foragers are making the colony bigger for a 6 frame hive, 1 or 2 weeks later.
- The remaining frames are placed in an empty hive. If possible, we need a minimum of 2 brood-frames to constitute the new swarm. We add one building frame + 2 warm partitions; then we move the hive on an apiary located in our fertilization zone.
- The next day, we introduce the fertilized queen bee of our choice, or more frequently, a 11 day old royal cell. Afterwards, we add 1 L of diluted syrup, even in a case of honey flow, in order to encourage the acceptance.
- As soon as the queen is laying eggs since 1 week or more, the hive is moved on an apiary outside the fertilization zone.
6 weeks after the swarm constitution, the colony is on 5 or 6 frames.
- Until 2012, we were dividing again the colonies to produce “swarms with a queen of the year”. One medium or strong hive at the end of winter (80% of the bee population) was giving 2 swarms during the season.
- Since 2013, we place a honey chamber on those swarms as the sweet chestnuts blossom approaches. Those small hives will participate in the testing or our strain queens, for the honey production.
Swarms’ production:
Multilingual apiarian lexicon
The behaviour of our strain colonies 
The lineage “strains” are inseminated queens that are used in the testing plan and/or in the grafting pool for the commercialized queens’ (...)
Le greffage
We graft 3 times/week from the end of March until mid-September, which represents approximately 60 mornings/year.
Each season, we produce more (...)
The breeders colonies
We rarely use the starter (maybe we are wrong?) .Until 2010, we were using orphan colonies. While today, we changed for a double system which is (...)
The incubator
We use the incubator from the 8th day to the 11th (sometimes until the 12th).
Inspired by the advices of many people, I created a heating system (...)
Swarms’ production
Each year, we produce 1000 overwintered swarms.
Those swarms are almost all produced on 6 frame hives. The hives provide us the necessary of bees (...)
The virgin queens’ production
We commercialize annually between 500 to 1000 virgin queens.
We let some queens be born outside of brooders, because: the apiculturists’ demand, (...)
Mated queens’ production
We produce yearly 4000 mated queens, exclusively in Kieler nuclei.
The Kielers are filled with package bees collected in our 10 frame hives. We (...)
The queens’ dispatch
Each year, we post more than 5000 queens. The fertilized queen bees are amassed on Wednesday, Friday and Monday morning. They are posted on (...)
Inseminated queens’ production
Each year, we inseminate more and more queen bees: 150 queens until 2011, over 300 queens in 2013, … and our objective is to increase even more (...)
Testing of our strain queens
We accord a lot of importance to the breeding of males. We own 200 hives provided with males frames, all located on a circle of 5 km of diameter. (...)
