Possible to add more bees to apidea?

[beejazz]

My second round of grafts went into their apideas 12 days ago, 2 only. I think I may have been too cautious in filling them with bees, I haven't got it just right yet, I over-filled the first time. So, is there any way to put more bees into the apideas? My worry is if the virgins have mated there won't be enough bees to cover the brood, they have drawn one frame only. Virgins emerged, heard piping 10/11 days ago.

[Jon]

Best way to increase numbers would be to put in a frame of sealed brood from an apidea which has a laying queen.
Adding bees often leads to the queen getting killed.
Depending on timing you can swap position of two apideas but only if they have mated queens or a virgin which has not flown and orientated yet, ie within a couple of days of emergence.

But the key thing is to fill them with the right amount of bees in the first place.
Take a few frames well covered in bees from the donor colony, spray them, and shake the bees into a lid.
You need to spray to stop too many flying off. Tip up the lid and jiggle the wet bees into a heap in one corner.
Use a scoop to measure a fixed amount of bees and fill the apidea through the floor.
300ml of bees is the figure usually quoted.
Some people use a cut down plastic milk container, or if you are stuck, a flora tub half full has about the right amount.

[Adam]

I have done as Jon suggests - a frame of sealed brood from another apidea will boost numbers. It CAN be difficult to get the right numbers inside as you can't always predict the percentage of bees that go back home once opened. One go this year resulted in quite a few bees returning to their (parent) hives so the mini-nucs were under-stocked. The next time I over-compensated and the little boxes are stuffed full!

One of my underfulled mini-nucs lost it's queen earlier this year so I moved it to close to another and then removed it so the flyers found the queenright mini-nuc and boosted numbers a little. The remainder were shaken out a day later so the empty mini-nuc could then be re-filled and used again.

If you take bees from the queenless part of a recent artificial swarm, there will be few flyers to return home. One technique I read somewhere which sort of works is to kick the box which has the bees in - before you spray and put them into the mini-nucs. The flyers will return home leaving the younger bees which will - hopefully - stay put.