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One for the Apidea experts? I'm the proud owner of 8 brand spanking new Apideas and want to get it right first time with them. The design seems brilliant and addresses all the things I didn't like about using Kielers last year.
Btw - grafted this morning using a left handed swiss tool and all I can say is wow! This thing seems to be tailor made for me.
Fondant is handier, but if they have to draw out comb from scratch they will probably do it more quickly with syrup.
Make it as thick as possible so bees are less likely to drown in it. A float or a twig helps as well.
The inner cover is flexible and if you hold it down over the excluder slot, you can bend it open enough at the back to fill the feed compartment with syrup without letting any bees escape.
Many thanks for that Jon - very helpful.
Another question occurs to me. I know about stocking them with young bees and last year (my first year of queen rearing) all I did was use bees from brood frames having caged the queen and shaken the frames lightly to dislodge flying bees.
So my question is - is there any reason I shouldn't just use bees from my supers instead? I'm sure I watched a youtube video a while ago of someone stocking Apideas doing just that.
Taking bees from the supers is a good idea as they are relatively young and there should be no drones in there. I often do this.
I only shake from brood frames if there are dozens of apideas to fill and when I do this it is usually using bees from the top box of a cell raiser or a demareed colony.
Again thanks Jon. I'm finding it so much easier this year as I feel I know how to approach the subject in a better way. Last year I made so many mistakes and it was a huge learning curve. I'm sure I'll make different mistakes this year and the bees will teach me a few lessons of their own along the way. But still there's nothing like having a go yourself. Just hoping my chosen queen will make daughters as good as herself.
There are a lot of good threads in this queen rearing section now so no shortage of information.
Get the right amount of bees in, don't put the cell in too early, and leave the apidea in a good shady place are perhaps the most important factors other than the quality of the genetics you are grafting from.
Bear in mind that the larvae you graft will have the same mother but maybe up to 15 different fathers involved so most of them will be half sisters rather than full sisters.
Unless you are sure of the drones your chosen queen mated with, you could have some very good and some not so good daughters.
I never graft from any queen showing evidence of hybridization in either the colour of the workers or the wing morphometry.