Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum
BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => REQUEENING & RAISING NEW QUEENS => Topic started by: alfred on April 27, 2014, 11:24:38 am
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I just did my first time ever grafting. I put the newly grafted larvae into a very densely populated queen less hive. Most of the videos and materials I read have you moving them to a queen-right hive to finish them off. I there any reason why they can't just stay in the queenless starter hive until they are capped over and I am ready to move them to nucs or the queen castle?
thanks,
Alfred
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You need plenty of young bees to build out the wax cells.
I usually use the cloake board method and when they start the cells I remove the plate and it is then a queen right hive to finish them off.
When they cap the cell off on day 6, I either move the cell bars to the incubator or leave them where they are at until day 15 before the emerge on day 16 or 17.
I've found that moving the cells sooner can injure the queen larva.
I then place the cell in a mating nuc.
I've found especially with the incubator that once the queen emerges from the cell she needs tender bees quick.
I mean within a very few hours.
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Would there be any harm in finishing them off in a hive with no queen?
Since mine are currently in a queenless hive for starting can I just leave them in there to finish? Then once they are capped move them to nucs?
Alfred
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No, no harm at all. I use a starter hive as the finisher hive all the time. Just make sure the hive is very crowded with younger bees and have plenty of nectar and pollen.
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Thanks, I didn't think that it would be a problem, but I wasn't sure because so many do move them to queenright to finish.
Alfred
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Capt44,
How do you pick the tender bees? Do you graft all the cells on the same day, or stagger them or something? Looks like you need a bunch of hives to provide tender bees for a large number of new queens. It looks to me like queen breeding would be very interesting, so a friend and I are just thinking about trying it. What do you suggest as a guide for starting, since nobody we know in Dallas is doing it? We are getting real tired of paying for a lot of failures, though, and we figure we can produce failures as well as the people we've been paying for the honor.
Gary
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Capt44,
I got all of my information by searching the internet. The forum here has been my best source. I also found a lot of info on Youtube. Michael Bush's website is a great resource as well.
I made a strong hive queenless by splitting the queen out into a nuc.
The next day I grafted all of the larvae.
Once the queen cells were capped over I moved them to individual nucs and queen castles.
Next time I am going to use a cloake board so that the cells can finish in a queenright colony.
It is a very bee intensive process meaning that a lot of bees are needed. This time I only had 8 cells out of 20 accepted. Clearly once I have better acceptance then I will need to have more bees and nucs to receive them.
Alfred