Jon

This morning I arranged to meet one of the our new BKA members. I've got to know him a bit over the last few months. He is a first year beekeeper with a single colony.
He is known to one and all as Tiny Tim given that he is 6' 11".
last week I discovered that he is is a native bee enthusiast and a BIBBA member.
He also has 15 mating nucs and is very keen to get going with queen rearing.
To some extent, as a beginner, he may be putting the cart before the horse with regard to wanting to do grafting and queen rearing but fair play to him and it has got to be a good way to learn.
I haven't reared queens through grafting myself so it is a good opportinity for me to learn a new trick as well.
We are going to make up a couple of cell starter colonies next Thurday by shaking loads of nurse bees into five frame cell starter boxes with cell plug lids. Grafting would then take place next Sunday when the bees know they are hopelessly queenless.
We are going to graft from my colony 33 which is the one with most AMM genes according to Drawwing.
It's one of my smaller colonies, really only nuc sized, but there will be enough larvae of the right age to graft.

He has had difficulty finding queens and I promised to show him a few tips re. where a queen is likely to be found. (near eggs, often on a frame with emerging brood which she is relaying almost as soon as the cells have been cleaned.) We opened a couple of boxes and found the queen and I did a bluffers talkover of why she was on the frame where we found her.

I then decided to make a bold prediction re. where I would find the queen in a double brood box colony before I even opened it. High stakes gambling or what! I told him that on Friday I had removed 3 frames of brood from this colony and replaced it with 2 frames of drawn comb and a frame of foundation in the centre of the upper box. In theory, two days later, the queen should be there taking advantage of all that empty cell space in the warmest part of the hive. I removed a couple of the outer frames and started working towards the centre. The first of the 3 new frames was laid up with eggs but no queen. The second was partly drawn out and was mostly filled with nectar for some reason. The 3rd had the queen on it laying away and I could have hugged her - but she is sadly just an insect and that would be inappropriate.
Good on her anyway. You have to admire a bee that doesn't let you down in public.