We have been through a lot of queens this year. The splitting season didn't start out in a very encouraging manner, but things turned around within a couple of weeks. Luckily, we had plenty of customers looking for queens even when we were not quite ready to use them. Our earlier queens went into a queen bank and then got shipped all over the country. Looking into a nurse hive. It's important to put in plenty of bees and some brood to make sure the queens are fed properly. You can see the tops of the cages in the middle of the box: Here is a lineup of plastic cages covered with nurse bees: Pulling out a queen to be shipped: Our first Iowa-raised queens are emerging this week. Hopefully we'll have good mating weather and the queen yard gets filled up quickly!