DR that's hugely helpful. Many thanks for sharing your results and showing the changing pattern of cell building in different conditions, through the season. (And a relief to know others too sometimes have no or poor starts!) Reading this, I'm pretty sure that my bees in the queenless cell starter day 1 began to start lots of cells (hence curtain of wax-builders hanging from them) but once the frame was above the Qx with the queen below, they changed behaviour to being stingy and drawing out only one cell. It ties in with your experience.
Rain is forecast for days and days but I'll feed up a colony with a view to creating queenless conditions and will try again when there's a break. So watch this space!
Your mini-plus hives probably aren't mature enough yet but just a thought -I've been using very strong double box mp's for cell raising with great success through the summer. True minimization of resources. Don't know how many good cells one of those units could handle as I've not needed to try for more than a dozen (which they handle very well) in one box at a time. Just another 'possible' to either consider or forget .
Interesting you add this Prakel. Plan to overwinter a few queens in double Mp boxes but, as you suggest, they're not strong enough to try this yet. Had also been wondering about fitting a Cupkit box into an mp frame and trying that and the mp cell raising next year, taking the queen and some of youngest brood out with the CK box.
I love grafting (though presumably lose some larvae through clumsiness) but the CK system can be useful and avoids larval damage.
Our colonies here are not large (Amm generally create small colonies and there's no OSR or equivalent here) so trying for 12 cells at a time would be fine. Do you double up the cells vertically in one frame or spread over two frames to go into the mps alongside one another?
Although I'm still not really convinced that this is a truly efficient way to start cells I will give it a go at some point.
But whatever route you take, you've got to shake through all of the combs in search of cells whether there are any or not. So I still fail to understand how this is acually easier than a broodless starter or one with only sealed brood as it's been suggested to be.
Last edited by prakel; 01-08-2015 at 09:54 AM.
You have to do that with a queenright system as well as the combs are constantly being circulated from the bottom box to the box above the excluder.
It is a PITA and if you miss a cell and a virgin emerges you lose a frame of cells. A couple of years ago at the association apiary I missed a cell on a comb and the cell starter swarmed with the virgin! I had to climb up a thorn tree to get it back.
Last edited by Jon; 01-08-2015 at 10:33 AM. Reason: typo
Bookmarks