Thats what has put me off using kielers i have. Find it so much easier borrowing frames of bees and making nucs up. Had a nightmare of a time filling them last year and made fatal mistake of inserting sealed cells and finding them chilled instead of running in virgins.
Cells should not get chilled in any type of mini-nuc. The trick is to insert the cell about 24 hours before the queen is due to emerge as she is fully formed at this stage. Some people put the cells into the apidea 3 or 4 days before emergence but if you do it that way you will lose a lot.
I cage mine 3 days before the day the queen is due to emerge, and put them in apideas 24 hours before emergence.
You get the odd one which hatches early in the roller and these are misted and dropped into the base of an apidea before having a dollop of wet bees dumped on top of them.
I got 65 cells and virgin queens into apideas for our queen rearing group yesterday teatime and this morning.
7 had hatched in the rollers and they looked like really nice queens. Very good size and black as yer boot!
I grafted another 75 today as well as you need to keep the production line coming along.
Two questions (but with a smile on my face having seen a virgin in an Apidea this afternoon, despite the paucity of bees in that one):
- do cages encourage chilling of the queen cell? Can the workers get at them to warm them?
- if it takes two weeks (ish) for a queen to come into lay and three weeks for the first brood to be ready and the queen properly matured before she can be moved on (and the mini-nuc recycled), then each Apidea (or Keiler, or whatever) must be out of action for about 5 weeks. Do you have a high attrition rate to justify the frequent grafting?
G.
My cells are reared in really strong cell raiser colonies, usually the cell bar with maybe 8 frames of brood and bees and a couple of frames of pollen so I doubt if the cells are going to get chilled in that set up.Originally Posted by gavin
The problem is transferring the cell to the apidea too early as only about 500 bees are responsible for keeping the queen cell warm enough so that she can chew her way out of the cell. You need to leave it as late as possible so timing is crucial.
Re. the second point, our group has way over 100 apideas among the members so there is a need to keep grafting every week. In addition, quite a few people take away queen cells to requeen dodgy colonies or queenless colonies without using apideas at all. There are probably about 50 or 60 apideas still waiting to get a queen cell.
A lot of queens get lost on orientation or mating flights.
It is good practice to check if there is still a queen present in the apidea about 10 days after emergence and if she has gone awol the apidea gets another cell.
Last edited by Jon; 02-06-2012 at 09:47 PM.
On a bad day populating mini-nucs isn't a pleasant job. However I only do it once a season. They can take repeated cycles of cells, and if necessary can even be left to raise a scrub queen to maintain brood until late season grafting (just remember to remove her before adding the new cell).
Like Jon I only add the cells within 24 hours of emerging. My cell finisher swarmed and the cells spent some time in my honey warming cabinet, where one emerged into the cage. Going by the contented hum from the Kielers today they've all now emerged (the difference is amazing when you turn the garage light on when queenless and once she has emerged - you can spot dud cells just by listening) and will be off to the mating apiary tomorrow evening. It's worth checking weekly late evening for stores - particularly if they went into a mini-nuc with no drawn comb - and for the queen.
It's been a good weekend ... I caught the swarm from my cell raiser as well
I normally take the laying queens away as soon as I see there's sealed brood - if you leave them until the brood starts to hatch you only have to miss time it by a day or so and a mini nuc becomes terribly overcrowded and you run the risk of a decent queen absconding with her little colony.
Hi MBC.
Using the queen excluder stops the absconding. I cut my own from plastic excluder and pin it to the outside of the apidea which allows about 20 slots for the entrance rather than just 3.
Check out post 12 in this thread re. research on the best time to remove queens.
I like to let a little brood hatch in the apidea as I can see immediately if the virgin has mated with yellow drones as yellow is dominant over black and you will see yellow bands in some of the newly emerged offspring. this gives me an early indication as to whether a queen might be a potential breeder.
If there is brood over three frames of the apidea I remove two frames and distribute them to apideas which are broodless or short of bees. It is like musical chairs keeping the right number of bees in them.
Hi Jon, I've enjoyed this thread so far, nice work !
You seem to have the luxury of time to play with to a greater degree than I do. Sometimes the first time I get to check a mini nuc is also used as an opportunity to take the queen and pop in a protected cell, so no time for musical chairs and despite waiting a month before checking I seldom get the chance to evaluate more than a good laying pattern and sealed brood rather than emerging brood (queens take an age to mate in wet and windy west wales too!). There is always pressure to have mated queens as early as possible and I can understand the temptation others give in to when they import queens to ensure they have them a brood cycle before they need to split their bees. I'm trying some mini plus mating hives this year with the intention of overwintering more queens in amalgamated units precisely to alleviate this pressure come Spring 2013( isnt it frustrating to have to wait seasons before seeing the fruits of some projects come to pass). I calculated two mini plus hives together make about the same comb area as eight national frames which should be adequate to overwinter a good proportion of them.
Hi, I've used the mini-plus version sold by Thornes since it first appeared in their catalogue -with great success when it comes to over wintering. Initially I did combine two boxes together but last winter I just left them as single box units to test the theory; lost only one out of eight -due to BBD (bad-beekeeper disorder) and starvation. ...But I am in the sunny South.
Last edited by prakel; 04-06-2012 at 10:48 AM.
Thanks prakel.
I might try some as a single overwintering box but I suspect for my minimalist intervention approach I might have more luck with a slightly bigger unit.
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