by Ryan Miller, Art by Nicholas Rombes

Isaac Miller spends almost all his daylight hours cradling the bees’ eggs, sampling their honey, and tricking their drones into breeding extra queens that he sells to beekeepers eager to inject some fresh genes into their own hives. “The whole process is fooling hives into thinking they need queens,” he says. “It’s a bait and switch.”

But Miller, a bearded young bee- keeper in San Luis Obispo, has learned that the bees are no easy marks. There’s an art to breeding queens for profit.

You have to locate a healthy hive filled with strong workers. Then, search the honeycombs for the queen. When you find her amid her 30,000 subjects, kill her. Don’t be squeamish. Load the hive with 48 newly hatched bees squirming in plastic chambers. With the hive mother gone, the drones feed the larvae royal jelly to bulk them up to brood-laying size. If you time it just right—after a few days have gone by but before the new queen crawls out— you might just find yourself with 38 baby queens squirming in the four dozen larvae.

While they mature in an incubator for a day or two, scoop a Spam tin through an established colony and dump the resulting 200 or so bees into a shoebox with three combs and a sugar-water dispenser. Add an emerging queen and you’ve got the base of a new hive. She’ll take her mating flight and start laying eggs.

After a couple weeks, pull her out, paint a dot on her with model airplane enamel, and sell her to a commercial beekeeper for at least $15. Repeat.