Queen Bee Breeding

Whether your goal is to rear a few queen bees or thousands, this manual provides the basic knowledge and instruction to get you started and can be applied to beekeeping operations ranging from several thousand colonies to one or two. 

A successful queen bee producer is well organised, committed, and pays attention to hygiene, pest and disease status and environmental conditions at all apiaries: be they mating or queen breeding apiaries or those holding production and support colonies. With practice, you can refine your queen rearing methods to suit your operation and resources. This manual can always be your point of reference. 

Rearing queen bees is a specialist job. It takes a significant level of experience and resources to produce good quality mated queens. In addition, rearing your own queen bees can be a lot of fun and can add an extra interest to your beekeeping.

Queens of superior quality result from a combination of: 

• good drone rearing and stocking practices 
• good queen rearing practices
• a program of continual stock selection.

Each of these three elements is addressed in-depth throughout this manual.

This publication was written by technical specialists of the NSW Department of Primary Industries and produced by Education Delivery, Tocal College.

It supports the following competencies from AHC10, The National Agriculture, Horticulture, Conservation and Land Management Training Package:

AHCBEK402A Perform queen bee artificial insemination
AHCBEK407A Rear queen bees