Setting up a cellraiser

[Jon]

May be optimistic but I set up a queenright cell raiser colony yesterday.
I was hoping to graft today but things are looking a bit grim.
Lots of drones and drone brood in my colonies.

[darlo]

Hi Jon
Interested in how you go about setting up a cell raiser colony? Do you need drones flying before doing it etc?

As yet I have not seen any sign of drones, or drone cells in any of my colonies.

[gavin]

If you don't even have drone cells in your colonies then I would wait - unless you think that there are drones being produced by other colonies near you. Mine have lots of drone sealed cells and some have a good handful of hatched drones.

Jon uses the method commonly called the Ben Harden method (although Ben notes that it isn't his). See the Wilkinson and Brown paper linked to in this thread:

http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/sh...-queen-rearing

cheers

Gavin.

[Jon]

And as you are constantly rearranging brood between two boxes it is a very effective means of swarm control as well. The queen is never short of space to lay in.

[nemphlar]

My 3rd year using the B H method, usually manage half a dozen grafts! Just checked and had to transfer 12 cells from 20 grafts into cages. They're due out around Wednesday can anyone advise how long can they safely be left in the cages

[Jon]

Virgin queens can die very quickly in cages. The bees do not always feed them like they do with a mated queen. Put a wee bit of fondant in the bottom of the cage as a food source. If I let cells hatch in cages I try and get a couple of bees inside the cage/roller before the cell hatches so that they act at attendants to the newly emerged queen.

[Neils]

How viable is a Nuc as a cell raiser? I'm somewhat lacking colonies suitable for too much fiddling right now but I could make up a Nuc without too much trouble. Will they go for it or is that a non starter?

[Rosie]

I am sure it will work Nellie but I would not put many grafts in as the limited number of nurse bees you have might compromise the quality of the queens if they struggle to feed them all abundantly. Remember to make sure they have plenty of nectar or syrup plus lots of pollen.

Rosie

[mbc]

How viable is a Nuc as a cell raiser? I'm somewhat lacking colonies suitable for too much fiddling right now but I could make up a Nuc without too much trouble. Will they go for it or is that a non starter?

Its a question of quality IMO, its quite possible to raise queencells in apideas but would you want the resulting queens heading your production colonies ? A healthy balance of bees is obviously required to raise the best possible queens and this balance is very difficult, if at all possible, to achieve manually. It often confounds me that despite taking as much care as practically possible to raise the very best queens from the youngest larvae in the very best provisioned cell raisers, experience and my records show that quite often the best production colonies are headed by queens who have either come from supercedure or swarm cells. While annoying (by making my queen rearing seem inadequate), this fact that becomes apparent from carefuylly kept records is actually quite conforting, mama nature does it best !

[Jon]

Not necessarily.

The 5 colonies I brought to our breeding apiary are all headed by grafted queens reared in queenright colonies introduced to apideas as queen cells on day 11 from grafting. Two of them are going into their 3rd season. All marked and clipped so definitely not supersedure queens.

prime genetic material.jpg

I have found that trying to introduce queens to a new colony when they have only been laying a short time leads to early supersedure.
I also suspect that nosema plays a significant role in early supersedure as a spring dwindle colony will throw up a supersedure cell and there is literature linking supersedure and nosema going back a long way.

But I do agree that supersedure queens are often a cut above the rest due to the extra nutrition and attention.
Trouble is going on another generation means you can lose control of the genetics.
It is easy to set up drone producing colonies if you are 100% sure of the queen you are grafting from but going on another generation it becomes a lottery.
Some of my grafted queens have produced colonies with 50% yellow workers due to the drones they have encountered.
If one of these superseded you could end up with a hybrid queen heading the colony.

John Rhodes and Graham Denney

This project aimed to identify critical areas in queen bee production and introduction, that may be contributing to low acceptance and poor early performance being reported with commercially reared queen bees.

Beekeepers have not been satisfied with the introduction success rate and early performance of commercially reared queen bees for a number of years.

Queen bees from five commercial queen bee breeders produced in spring and in autumn were introduced into honey production apiaries belonging to three commercial beekeepers. Survival rates of test queens and older control queens were monitored at 4- week intervals for 16 weeks. Data considered critical to the survival and performance of test and control queens were recorded.

A significant loss of 30% of spring reared queens occurred compared to a loss of 13% of autumn reared queens. Control queen losses were 17% during the spring trial and average of 5% for the autumn trial. The age of the queen at introduction, numbers of spermatozoa stored in the queen’s spermatheca, Nosema disease, physical damage to the queen during transport, and external hive conditions were identified as factors, which may have contributed to the queen bee failures.

Further trial work investigated survival rates of commercially reared queen bees introduced into commercial honey production apiaries when the queens being introduced were 7, 14, 21, 28 and 35 days of age. The minimum age at which queen bees should be caught from mating nuclei lies between 28 and 35 days, this provided the premium survival after 15 weeks of 66.25% (60% when queens caught at 28 day and 72.5% when queens caught at 35 days).

This project is continuing and has lead to more beekeepers requeening colonies in the autumn and commercial queen breeders catching queens from nucleus colonies at between 28 and 35 days so the purchased queens have a better chance of survival.

http://www.beekeeping.com/articles/u..._australia.htm