Jason Bragg’s ii Class

Just returned from vising Jason Bragg at https://wvqueenbees.com/ to take his 2 day instrumental insemination class. While I’ve been insturmentally inseminating queens for a few years my success rates haven’t been as high as I wanted, and I ran into an issue this year where I was getting way too many drone layers.

Tom and I packed up and headed to Summersville, West Virginia July 5th to meet Jason and refine our technique and process. We arrived that evening after stopping in Charleston, WV for some bbq and dropped our queen bank nuc off at Jason’s training facility.

Saturday’s class started at 10:00 am. We set up our equipment and got everything ready. Jason looked over the equipment and pointed out a few things that needed to be changed around so we made those changes. We talked through my process to disinfect and clean everything and then walked through the process to getting the equipment sanitized and ready for collection. After that we hit the bee yard and grabbed some drones! Jason walked us through how he keeps the drones and most importantly how he collects from them. After we both collected for an hour or so we got out some queens and set up to ii!

The process went pretty well, Jason would provide feedback and helped me trouble shoot alignment issues and other things he saw in the process/technique that needed to be tweaked.

Sunday was a repeat of Saturday but w/ the pressure off things went very smoothly. Since we weren’t so focused on the process/technique we had more time to walk through questions and talk through best practices and alternative way to do things and still be successful. Overall, it was quite the brain drain!

We left more confident in our technique, a much better set of processes and procedures and an increased level of confidence. Jason was patient and did a great job of not only talking through the process but also would demonstrate. There was plenty of time to practice and to walk through problems that came up and how to deal with them.

Overall it was a fantastic experience! I highly recommend going to visit Jason if you are interested in learning how to instrmentally inseminate queen bees!