Cupkit System

[ebee]

I understand the basics of the cupkit system what confuses me is the timing, once the queen has laid in the brown cells are the cells placed in the queen less colony straight away or do you wait a further 3 days can anyone enlighten me.

[Jon]

Hi Ebee. I graft rather than using cupkit but the principle is the same.
The bees start a queen cell from a suitable aged larva rather than an egg so I imagine you have to wait until the egg has hatched before putting the cups in your cell raiser colony - which does not necessarily have to be queenless.
I think Jimbo mentioned that he uses cupkit so he would be the best placed to comment.
I suspect that all unhatched eggs would be removed on introduction.

[Jimbo]

I have used the cupkit system for a number of years. For your timings you can download a nice excel sheet from the BIBBA web site called Tom's Tables. You just enter your start date and it corrects all the dates and times for you. In practice I have found that the queen sometimes when placed in the cupkit will stop laying so after 24 hr I check for eggs using a magnifying glass. If I don't see any I leave the queen for a further 24hrs and usually find eggs on the second visit. This alters the dates on Tom's Tables by 1 day, but other than that I find it an easy system to use and get about a 70% success rate in producing the queen cells ready for Apideas

[bees4u]

that's a very useful site, thanks for the tip

[Adam]

I used a cupkit for the first time last year. On both occasions I put it in the centre of the broodnest for a day first so the workers could prepare the cells. Queen in the next day. I left her in for 1 day the first time and 2 days the next (I think). Then put the brown plastic cups in the holders and into the queenless part of a rearing hive. So in both cases it was eggs that went in rather than 1 day old larvae. The brown colour of the cups means that you should be able to see eggs through the translucent plastic. Poundland glasses always helps.

[Jon]

That's interesting Adam. I read somewhere that eggs would be rejected and it had to be larvae.
As Roger Patterson often says, you read a lot of twaddle in bee books.

[ebee]

I used a cupkit for the first time last year. On both occasions I put it in the centre of the broodnest for a day first so the workers could prepare the cells. Queen in the next day. I left her in for 1 day the first time and 2 days the next (I think). Then put the brown plastic cups in the holders and into the queenless part of a rearing hive. So in both cases it was eggs that went in rather than 1 day old larvae. The brown colour of the cups means that you should be able to see eggs through the translucent plastic. Poundland glasses always helps.

Hi Adam, thanks for the clear description of the cupkit being used that info has given me what i needed to try it out.

[alancooper]

I graft rather than using cupkit but the principle is the same.
The bees start a queen cell from a suitable aged larva rather than an egg so I imagine you have to wait until the egg has hatched before putting the cups in your cell raiser colony - which does not necessarily have to be queenless.
I suspect that all unhatched eggs would be removed on introduction.

I also graft (using the Ben harden queen-right system) and get reasonable success. This year (I am now confident with my larva grafting technique) I grafted eggs - with zero success (grafted larvae a few days later were successful). Can anyone else confirm?

[The Drone Ranger]

I also graft (using the Ben harden queen-right system) and get reasonable success. This year (I am now confident with my larva grafting technique) I grafted eggs - with zero success (grafted larvae a few days later were successful). Can anyone else confirm?

There has been some debate about grafting eggs and consensus is it doesn't work.
Likewise you wait till eggs hatch when using cupkit

[masterbk]

Someone will need to tell my bees as over the last three years I have on three occasions put frames with 20 plastic cupkit cells with 3 day old eggs from cupkit into colonies using cloake board system and got between 9 , 14 and 11 queen cells respectively (in comparision with 1 day old larvae I have achieved between 15 and 19) . Use of eggs all came about because queens didn't lay right away in the cupkit box so when I went to transfer the cells on the 4th or 5th day all I found was eggs and due to circumstances (a weeks foreign holiday in every case) I could not wait as it would be impossible for me to come the next day to transfer larvae. I must try in future not to queen rear so close to booked holidays ( dates of which are determined by my better half) The main problem I have with cupkit is the queen escaping from the box through the gaps down the sides between the front cover and the box if the cover is not pressed firmly enough into position with just a small amount of wax or propolis allowing the gap to be large enough for he rto squeeze through (you don't get this probelm with jenter as the front cover fits tight to the face of the box).