Report on John Anderson’s queen rearing in 2018.
The last week of June I (John Anderson – www.LoneOakHoney.com) was able to purchase two queens from Michael Bush for my own hives. As soon as I had larva the right age, I grafted 36 queen cups. This was my first time grafting and the first cell bar went pretty slow and only a few cells were completed on that first cell bar. The starter / finisher hive ended up with 11 capped queen cells. Each capped queen cell was put into a mating NUC with one frame of brood and bees and one frame of honey and bees. This is enough bees and resources that the mating NUC can get established without the beekeeper have to feed it and check it often. Nine of these 11 cells hatched, only 5 of them were successfully mated and started laying. Those 5 were feed sugar syrup starting in August and built up to around 8 frames in each hive. 4 of the 5 will overwinter in 4 over 4, side by side, resource hives (Support Hives) and 1 will overwinter in a standard hive.
In August I tried one more round of grafting as we had someone interested in getting capped queen cells. From my first round of grafting I learned it is a huge advantage if all of the larva you are grafting from are all the same age, so you don’t have to spend time looking for just the right size larva each time you go to transfer a larva. I did this by making a push in queen cage from a cut down queen excluder with some paint stir sticks glued to it.
Next time I will try using metal flashing material instead of paint stir sticks. It was hard to push the paint stir sticks into the wax frame. I took a drawn frame that had nothing in the cells and put the queen on it, then I put this cage over her. The worker bees can get in and out of it, but the queen cannot. So the queen can only lay in the cells within the cage. Four days later, every larva is exactly the right age to graft, 12 to 24 hours old. I grafted 60 queen cups and put them into my starter finisher hive. The next day when I checked the cells none of them were drawn out. I discovered I had not gotten my Cloake board pushed in all the way and the bees were able to pass up and down between the queen-right part of the hive and the queen-less part. Therefore they were not really queen-less and were not interested in raising queens. I tried again and grafted 60 more queen cups. I left on vacation the next day and was not able to check on the cells until I got back over 1 week later. At that point I found the colony had absconded or crashed. I had not taken the time to go all the way through the hive before smoking the bees up through the Cloake board. If I had I would have seen there was something wrong at that point. I did notice there were not as many bees coming up as there should have been, but I was in to big a hurry to investigate at that time. Plus it was 95 degrees that day and Dave Korver’s advice of “Think cool thoughts” was not helping much.
- So I learned a couple of lessons:
- 1 Get the Cloake board set up right.
- 2 Make sure the starter finisher is strong and healthy.
I got 0 queen cells from that round. But I did get quite a bit better at grafting sooner than I thought I would.