Queen banks are needed periodically to safely take care of queens that are being stored before being introduced into a hive. All of us from time to time have queens we want to introduce into a hive but cannot do so for a few days. A queen bank can be set up to take care of as few as 1 queen or as many as several hundred. They are simple to set up and maintain.

The queen bank is usually a single deep colony well stocked with young bees that is made queenless. The colony is usually supplied with a feeder but if plenty of food is available on the frames of bees and brood no feeder is necessary. The queens that are being banked are placed in a special frame that permits the bees access to each of the queens to provide food, water and warmth. Usually the queen is stored in the cage the queen is mailed in. Access to the candy side must be restricted or the bees in the queen bank will release the queens. Other shipping cage styles can also be stored without any difficulty.

A special frame is constructed to place the queen cages in. This frame can be made having queens back to back so that bees can cluster on both sides of the frame providing warmth for cold nights. Also it is best to have the queens placed high on the frame and away from the ends of the frame where there may be fewer bees to take care of the queens. My storage frames for 3 hole mailer cages are constructed with 1/8" hardware cloth down the center of the frame and have two shelves on each side. The 3 hole cages fit into the frame snuggly and have a retaining wire across to hold the cages in place. Each frame can bank about 50 queens. Two of these frames can be placed in a single hive body so you can store 100 queens in a single hive body. I like to provide a feed to keep the bees happy.

If you wished to store just a few queens 2 to 10 this could be done easily using a single sided frame in a 5 frame nuc. The special frame is inserted into the center frame position with bees and brood facing both sides of the queen mailing cages. Set up the nuc three days before the queens arrive by placing 4 frames of bees and brood from one of your hives into the nuc. Each day shake more bees into the nuc as some of the bees will have drifted back to their parent hive. By the end of the 3rd day the nuc should be nice and full of bees and you can put your queens in their special frame in the center of the nuc. This method insures that the bees in the nuc that are going to be taking care of your queens are all young bees as all of the old bees will have drifted back to the parent hive. This nuc can easily be maintained for weeks, if you desire, by shaking new bees into the nuc each week. New brood should also be added if the bank is kept going more than a week.