We maintain a succession of queen banks at the bee store from mid April through mid August.  It is simply a small queenless hive with lots of young nurse bees to take good care of the queens until such time as they are sold.  I use five frame nuc boxes for my queen banks.  I simply pull out two frames of capped brood from one of my hives at home for each queen bank.  The capped brood will emerge over the next twelve days and provide a continuous supply of young nurse bees.  When I get down to the last queen I usually allow the bees in the queen bank to release her.  I can use these released queens to either requeen one of my colonies at home or to supply a small colony for the observation hive in the shop. Besides I think it is a good idea for me to use some of the queens that I sell simply for quality control.

   When we receive a new shipment of queens they come in what is called a battery box.  That is about 50 queens in their individual cages with about a half a pound of loose bees inside the box to care for them.  When they arrive I have to transfer the queens to the queen bank.  The queens usually come in what is called a California mini cage. Each cage has a hard plastic tube filled with fondant which acts as the release mechanism when the queens are installed in a new hive.  Since we don't want any of them released prematurely I have some modified frames that queen cages are placed into which don't allow the bees to access the fondant.  I place one frame of queens on either side of the two fraames of capped brood in the nuc box and then add the loose bees from the battery box.  In order to minimize fighting between the two groups of bees I spray them all down with a strongly scented sugar syrup to make it more difficult for them to tell friend from foe.   The scented sugar syrup is pretty important. I omitted it once and ended up with a significant pile of dead bees in front of the queen bank.

    When I make up a new queen bank I am always very careful to try to avoid using frames with any eggs lest the bees start raising their own queens.  However, the eggs are so very small and it is very easy to miss them if there are only a few eggs on the frame.  This happened with me on my last queen bank. Since I am often somewhat busy when I have to get into the queen bank I don't always check the two frames of brood as often as I should. The queen bank had been in use for about a week before I noticed that we had a few queen cells in progress.

    A loose queen in the queen bank is a serious problem as she will immediately start killing the caged queens.  Once I had a queen escape while I was marking her.  I thought she had simply flown away, but darn if she didn't find her way back into the queen bank twenty feet away. I lost several hundred dollars worth of queen bees before I discovered that I had a loose queen in the queen bank.  Since then I have used a queen muff when marking queens so they are better contained.

   Normally I would scrape off any queen cells I found in a queen bank, but I decided to try something different this time.  I made up two "press on" cages using number eight hardware cloth and used the cages to confine the queen cells.   One cage didn't seem to stay in place very well so I did end up removing two of the queen cells.  The other cage worked as intended and I was able to remove a virgin queen about a week later.  I marked the queen, put her into a queen cage clearly marked "Virgin Queen" and gave her to a friend.

   The following photos show me removing a frame of queens from a queen bank and holding it up so you can see what I'm talking about.  Our immediate next door neighbors at the bee store are plumbers who fortunately are gone most of the time.  They have been pretty patient about the small bee hive in fromt of the store.  The honey customers usually aren't beekeepers so some of them will get a little nervous about the bees out front.  However, I simply remind them that it is a bee store after all.