Cloake Board: The Essential Tool for Sustainable Queen Rearing

Overview: Experience the ease of queen rearing with the Cloake Board, a revolutionary beekeeping equipment innovated by Harry Cloake. This board is a cost-effective solution, especially for beginners in queen rearing, streamlining the process with minimal disturbance to the hive.​

Key Features:

• Innovative Design: The Cloake board, available in various configurations, features a wooden frame with an additional entrance and a grooved interior to insert a metal tray. It also includes a queen excluder at the bottom or separately, depending on the model.
• Simple & Effective: Ideal for beekeepers with a limited number of hives, this method allows for the raising of high-quality queens using just a single hive, encompassing the roles of donor, cell starter, and cell finisher.
• Versatile Application: Compatible with 10 FRAME equipment, the Cloake board method involves stages that divide a colony into a queen-right lower colony and a queenless upper colony, enhancing the acceptance of grafted larva or facilitating natural queen cell creation.

How To Use:

1. Place the Cloake board between two hive bodies, ensuring the queen is in the lower body. The board, fitted with a queen excluder, keeps the queen restricted below.
2. Move frames with larvae to the upper box, attracting nurse bees essential for future queen cells.
3. Use the metal divider to separate the colony into two parts, creating a higher bee population in the upper colony for effective queen rearing.
4. Once queenless, the upper colony begins creating emergency queen cells, focusing attention on a single brood frame.
5. Rejoin the colonies with the slide-in-divider removed, allowing the combined colony to incubate the grafted queens.

Benefits:

• Ease of Use: Simple to operate, the Cloake board method is popular among newer beekeepers for its straightforward approach.
• Efficient Queen Production: Ensures a high success rate in queen rearing, with field bees contributing to a conducive environment for queen development.
• Focus on Bee Traits: Allows selection of colonies with desired traits like gentleness, laying pattern, pest tolerance, and honey collection for queen rearing.

Conclusion: The Cloake board is an indispensable tool for modern beekeepers looking to raise queens efficiently and sustainably. Its user-friendly design and effective queen-rearing process make it a must-have for both novice and experienced beekeepers.