So - no sooner had I decided to go down the AMM route, and had duly installed a couple of AMM queens - than a swarm of Heinz bees invited themselves to stay, and have shown themselves to be exceptionally well-behaved. Indeed, they've been so well-behaved that although it's very late in the season I've decided to have a stab at cloning that colony, and figure out over winter how best to run 2 separate sets of bees ...

Now what I found interesting, is that after creating a queenless nuc-sized colony from pinching a frame here, and another from there, etc., and removing the resulting q/cells after 3 or 4 days, then installing a frame of eggs/larva from the ex-swarm Heinz bees into that colony - is that a total of 8 emergency q/cells have been created.
Now it occurred to me that if those bees have the necessary resources to create 8 emergency cells, then they'd surely have enough resources to build (say) 4 regular queen cells of decent quality if given suitable grafts.

This would be such a simple queen-raising technique that I'm sure it's been done countless times over the years - but I just wondered - has anyone here ever played with this idea ? The basic idea being: do a split; remove any q/cells created; install a small number of grafts on a bar and then walk away, returning only to cage the results.

Anyway - fingers crossed there'll still be some drones flying during the first week of September ...

LJ