Queen raising 2014
Few drones wandering around the brood frames this weekend / plenty more emerging - but not seen any flying as yet.
I have my abelo double mating hive all painted up and ready to rock as well as 3 homemade efforts and a few nucs I can convert for mating hives.
So.....when are people starting to graft etc ? Plans for the season ahead ? Tips ?
Thought it was time for a fresh thread
Early May's my preferred time, I could start now I suppose but there's no pressure on me to get queens mated extra early to fill gaps or make a little increase -that's what the overwintered mating nucs were for.
I have already made up nucs with three of the four queens I overwintered in apideas.
Early May would be good. No point until there are masses of drones.
Last year I had no mated queens until the end of June so hoping for a better start this year.
Too soon … the bees know best. Grafted on the last couple of days with poor 'take'. Given up until May …
It's early down here. one hive already artificially swarmed, drones out and about and a few colonies well advanced raising them. The colony I've AS I've removed the drone brood from for both IPM and it's just swarming too early for my liking so better to keep their drones reduced.
Just made a small batch of cell cups for an initial start later this week.Originally Posted by prakel
Just a few questions !
My first grafting attempts pretty much failed - out of 20 grafts only 3 resulted in drawn cells. I was finding getting the very young larvae off the grafting tool quite difficult and may have damaged a fair number of them....any hints ?
Secondly, these cells are now sealed and due to hatch on saturday / sunday. I want to start grafting again straight away.....is it okay to move these to mating nucs on friday and then start again (after moving brood frames around in the rearing hive).
I have access to a small incubator as well. Would it be possible to move newly sealed cells carefully into this incubator and leave them until near hatching ? What would the optimum temp and humidity be ?
I have had to stop my queen rearing because the continuous rain has caused a severe shortage of pollen stores in my queen rearing colonies. You might be suffering from the weather rather than your grafting ability. I always transfer my queen cells 10 days after grafting and a day or 2 before they emerge. Occasionally I put cells in my honey warming cabinet set at about 34 degrees C with a bowl of water to keep it moist. I don't know exactly what the ideal humidity and temperature should be and suspect they are not that critical because they rarely fail.
That's a good idea Rosie.
How do you arrange / suspend the cells in the cabinet?
In oasis?
This year I'm going to trial getting queens mated in a four way mating nuc inside one standard box so that my frames are the same for all my boxes. Although I will run my apideas too so I can compare and contrast the success/failure!
___________________________________
brothermoo.wordpress.com
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks