Bees are beeutiful.

They make our gardens a sight to beehold.

And they make beelicious honey.

So today at Purdue Bee Lab, The Beekeepers of Indiana are learning how to make their own queens to keep their colonies happy and healthy.

Yeah.

I'm Krispn Given, a senior apiculture specialist here at Purdue University.

We have a queen rearing class that we've been conducting for about 21 years, and the students are basically learning how to produce their own queen.

So they want to produce queens that are superior quality.

But unlike Krispn here, I'm not much of a bee lover.

So I ask this beekeeper what he would say to someone who's a self-described buzzkill.

Number one, I would ask them if they like to eat.

Because bees, of course, are responsible for about 30% of the food we eat.

Anything that has a seed in it is generally pollinated.

They even help put meat on the table.

Now, not that bees have to pollinate beef, but if you think about it, if the farmer feeds his cattle, alfalfa.

Alfalfa has to be pollinated.

So tie together okay.

So bees make good food.

But aren't they aggressive?

In my opinion, no.

So remember this.

All right.

If you get a bee in the veil try to kill it in there because a lot of guys will pull it off and then there's 50 of them on the outside waiting to get you.

Got it?

No mercy?

All right.

No mercy.

What are some of the things you shouldn't do?

Like to a colony?

I wouldnt throw rocks at it.

Turn it over.

Generally, as a rule, bees are not going to say.

“Oh, look at that guy.

Let's go get him” You're talking yellow jackets now.

I mean.

*laughs* While this is interesting to me, to The Beekeepers of Indiana this is elementary stuff, but they are still learning new things every day, and they do it together.

The Beekeepers of Indiana, of course, is registered as a nonprofit organization under the laws of 5013C stuff, but primarily we're focused in education, networking, we network with clubs and we support research.

You know, we also go support laws that are helpful to beekeepers.

We greatly depend on each other with over a thousand members and counting.

The beekeepers of Indiana treat this as a shared craft supporting up and coming beekeepers.

I'm here today to learn a little bit about grafting.

Part of what my goal is for today is to change some of the genetics in my yard.

Looking for better bees mite resistant bees.

Grafting so I can continue the genetics that I have in my yard currently and move forward and increase the number of colonies that I have.

The class attracts students Indiana, the country , and the world.

But to learn something like this with a large group, you mean an equally large facility, which is why the Beekeepers of Indiana has partnered with Purdue Bee Lab for this weekend course.

So I'll give you the tour, and then I'll pass it off.

This is one of five apiaries that we have.

We keep about 50 colonies at each apiary, give or take.

This is our primary research apiary.

So all the colonies here are used for, student research.

We have, about seven PhD students and three postdocs in the lab that do research on basic honeybee biology, bee breeding, bioinformatics, biochemistry, you name it.

We're the honeybee lab here.

And with 200 colonies, custom equipment, and some of the world's best bee researchers, I couldn't think of a better place to learn.

The male bees in those four colonies right there.

Have RFID tags on their back, and every time they enter and exit the colony, we know because it gets tagged.

So we're continually monitoring them 24 7.

It's pretty fun.

And the fun doesn't stop there.

Purdue Bee Lab is home to the Purdue mite biter, a unique type of honeybee and one that's changing the world.

And that's by design.

For the past 20 years, Krispn has been selecting on bees that are resistant to Varroa mites, which is our primary threat to bees.

Our bees actually chew them up when they're inside of a colony.

They kind of beat them up.

They chew off their legs.

So they're they're lovingly called the Purdue mite biter.

So Krispn manages that program.

We work with the Beekeepers of Indiana and the Indiana Queen Breeders Association to keep that trait going.

So this is a bee that has behavioral resistance to these parasitic mites.

So the Varroa mite you can think of as a it's like the size of your fist.

So it's a vector parasite, it vectors viruses.

So the more mites in a colony, more viruses, more mortality.

So with the mite biting strain, we've reduced the impact of that through selective breeding.

So it's a constant selection process.

It takes a lot of resources and specialized beekeeping skills to accomplish that.

Skills and resources that these beekeepers hope to gain.

I actually took the class last year and, wanted to come back because as most adults know, you're going to retain 40% of what you're taught.

So I wanted to come back and make sure that, I can recap some of the stuff that I was trained on last year.

The process of grafting larvae to create queens is one worth learning because, well, a hive without a queen will eventually become a hive without honey.

Now, normally, only one queen would emerge from a queenless hive like this one.

But through careful larval grafting, the beekeepers can enable the hive to produce a whole batch of them.

And step one is selecting your larvae.

So this is the hunt method.

So I'm searching for the right age larvae.

I want something under 36 hours.

So larvae that are grafted earlier will have more ovarioles.

So more ovarioles means more egg laying, more eggs means more workers, more workers means more honey.

Then the larvae are placed into artificial cups, which are inserted back into the queenless hive to grow.

Now the larvae starts out, it's not really going to be a queen, it's destined to be a worker.

So what happens is when we graft them and put them into this queenless, hopelessly queenless scenario, they want to produce new queens so they can survive.

So what happens is they'll turn those worker destined larvae into queen larvae, so they feed them what we call royal jelly.

Produced by young worker bees.

This royal jelly is ultimately what transforms these larvae into queens.

So the young larvae destined to be queens are fed ad lib all they can eat.

So very often there's royal jelly left.

They don't consume all of it.

In a perfect scenario, that's what you want.

You want them to have more food than they can possibly to ensure a quality queen.

But if you get the timing wrong, nearly the whole batch fails.

You know, if you can attempt to graft on your own.

But if you don't know what you're doing, you put the wrong size larva in there?

You can literally end up.

If you put one in there older than all the rest of them.

This one's going to hatch out first.

And you know what a Queen's first job is?

When she hatches out?

Seek and destroy any other queens.

Assuming everything went well, though, these hopeless hives will be queenless, no more in about two weeks, giving each colony a future and a renewed sense of purpose.

Something these folks never lost.

But what keeps them coming back?

We make a little bit of honey, but we're not really looking for the honey.

Really, what we're looking for is pollinating, sharing an experience.

And, it's time consuming, but fun.

I'm not into it to buy a new car, or for the money, but I do love it.

And I love teaching about beekeeping, so it gives me something to look forward to and I am passionate about it.

Like I said, I've always seen or had bees.

For me, its the discoveries like the the hexagons and then the formation of the comb, the complex social behaviors that they have, they're not just one individual that works.

They work together collectively, somewhat like we do.

And there's so much we have yet to discover and I hope to be a part of that.