Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum
BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => DOWN UNDER BEEKEEPING => Topic started by: Dalon on February 15, 2017, 06:40:04 am
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Hi all,
I've embarked on making some queens for next season. As I only needed a few and someone suggested that I cut 'wedges' into an open brood frame from the parent hive, exposing eggs and 1-day old larvae in the space created by removing the wedges. This let me make some Queens without the need to graft.
I placed this in a five frame nuc with the appropriate capped brood, pollen and honey frames and shook bees so it was over flowing. I got 5 good looking queen cells off this single frame.
I had a angry hive that I used some of the bees/frames as the cell starter. Once the cells were 10 days old (14 days from egg), I killed the queen from the angry hive and then divided out the frames to make the mating Nucs. I had the cell starter, original hive and 3 additional Nucs to support the 5 QC I got off the parent frame.
A rather long intro but my question is in relation to any of the open brood that is now in the hive and/or Nucs. As the queens have not hatched (or yet mated), are the bees likely to make new queen cells from the open brood in addition to the queen cells that I added? I'm conscious that the brood is from the angry queen and don't want them to propagating. I will check in a weeks time but curious to know if bees sense the queen cell and if they continue to build cells until they have a mated queen in the hive.
Thanks Leon
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If you've put a ripe queen cell into a now queenless hive they won't normally build more queen cells. But yes a quick check in a few days would be good.