Setting up a cellraiser

[Jon]

It seems obvious that you sandwich the graft between 2 frames of brood to have more nurse bees in the locale, but the Ben harden method suggest 1 of brood and 1 food.

My method is more like the Wilkinson and Brown which Ben Harden adapted as I generally have 9 or 10 frames of brood and pollen in the top box as opposed to 5 or 6 and a couple of dummies.

I grafted 110 larvae today into 5 queenright cellraisers.

I grafted 12 last night at our queen raising group on a hive roof in bad light to demonstrate grafting and checking this afternoon they had started 7 so I am hopeful they are now in the mood with this glorious weather. I was surprised as I had a lot of diffs getting the larvae off the brush and I had 25 people around me watching. Sometimes the cattle all come over as well and then you have a really big audience. The paint brush got passed around several times so that folk could see the size of the larva you have to graft.

unloading-hives3.jpg

[Neils]

So if you're putting the hair rollers on them in the cell raiser, are you closing the bottoms off with something? The ones that came courtesy of the busy bee shop are all open bottomed or are you just using hair rollers that are closed at the bottom at this point?

Apologies if these are slightly stupid questions, I want to make absolutely sure that what I think I'm doing is right.

[Jon]

The roller cages are open at the end you put over the cell and the bottom opens and closes. You can put a wee bit of fondant in the bottom in case a queen hatches early and needs something to eat.

[Neils]

Definitely a blond moment there, of course they do

[Neils]

Final silly question, as a noob. Is there any value going up the day before and marking/identifying a frame of eggs that I reckon might be larvae by the following day? I'm thinking this is probably overkill.

[Jon]

What you can do is place a frame of drawn foundation right in the centre of the brood nest of the colony you want to graft from 4 days before you graft.

[Neils]

That might have to wait for the second attempt, I'm going to miss that deadline so will have to wing that bit.

[Jon]

I don't usually bother either but today I has real difficulty finding suitable aged larvae. It was cold and rainy all last week up until Sunday and then turned hot on Monday. The queens obviously shut down towards the end of the week as nearly all the frames were sealed brood, older larvae or eggs. I did find one good frame but it was not from the colony I had planned to graft from but still a good one.

[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