Raising native queens

[Jimbo]

[Continued from the 'Your Gallery of 2D plots' thread. G.]

Hi EmsE,

3 hours to get in, worked for 40 mins, sent the staff home, 2.5 hrs to get home and that was in our Kick A** 4X4.
When I started bee breeding I read up on a lot of methods and got confused. I then selected 3 methods which I now use depending on what I wish to do. For honey production colonies I just do splits and requeen. I also use a method of Queen production using the cloake board and a queen right colony but now have moved to Cupkit instead of graphting in a queenless colony as I find it more suitable for my situation and using Apideas for mating

[gavin]

who sent that snow storm over to the west!!

We thought that it was time you guys (and gals) saw some of the real stuff! What a fuss people were making on R Scotland tonight - just because they'd been stuck on the M8 for 8 hours! Woosses! (Gavin ducks for cover)

I read Alan Campion's book 4 times then Ted Hooper's book about 12 times. I think that I've got it now, after making most of the mistakes you can make and practicing for around 14 years. But I didn't have a helpful community of forum-posters to call on back in those days.

Queen raising for me has been artificial swarms, then in the last 5 years or so, the Wedmore split National box method thingie based on a double brood box separated by a super at the right time to stimulate queen cell production if they weren't doing it already. I've even forgotten the right name for the method. The only time I've touched an Apidea was at John and Enid's summer workshop ... but I'll be going for it in 2011. So I'm just a learner too.

30 min to get to work this morning (plus 15 to warm the car and remove the latest dump of snow) and 20 min to get home again (plus 15 to warm the car as it was -10C already and the windows were frosted). Twice as long as usual!

G.

[EmsE]

Hi Jimbo,

I was thinking about grafting (using the JZBZ cell cups??) & using a queen-right colony as it was the easiest for me to follow. It also means that I don't need to loose a queen until I'm happy about her replacement (is this being too cautious). Grafting is something I should learn.- (need to go rescue the dinner. Hubby just used icing sugar instead of cornflour to thicken the lamb gravey:eek:)

[Jon]

Grafting the larvae is the least difficult part.
Even if you are poor at it, you just regraft the next day, then the next day, until you have as many queen cells as you want.
I grafted for the first time this year using queenright colonies and it worked well.
I produced 120 queen cells from my best two colonies.
Setting up the queenright colony properly and getting the nutrition right for the grafts in the cups is the most important thing.
People make a song and dance about grafting but anyone can do it.
Apideas are the way to go. I have 12 and have ordered another six.

[Jimbo]

Hi Jon,

I agree with you about the grafting It is not that difficult. It is even easier once somebody shows you how to do it. Apideas again are good once you get the hang of them.

[Jon]

We need to encourage Mervyn Eddie to post his thoughts on a thread like this as he has been grafting larvae and managing 50 or 60 Apideas for several years now. I picked up a load of tips from him this year

[EmsE]

People make a song and dance about grafting but anyone can do it.
Apideas are the way to go. I have 12 and have ordered another six.
Are apideas mainly used if replacing queens or can they easily be expanded into full colonies? Is there enough space in there to assess if you've a good queen? - I'll let you know about the 'anyone can do it' next year.

M8? - hate that road even on a good day! We were quite happy not sharing the snow thank you. Schools are off tomorrow so they say & they don't even know what the weather is going to be like.

[Jon]

Hi Emse
They are really for mating queens rather than expanding into full colonies.
When the queen starts to lay it is best to leave her for a couple of weeks as you can see if she is laying a decent brood pattern.
It has also been shown that the ideal age for introducing a queen to a new colony is 25 days after mating. (don't have the reference at hand)
When you remove a queen from an Apidea, the usual practice is to insert a queen cell on the point of hatching and rear another queen.
You should be able to get two queens per apidea or maybe 3 in a good year.

[gavin]

Might be worth planning to go via a nuc-type method first if you are wanting to increase, and maybe fiddle with an Apidea or two as an experiment? It is easy to be too ambitious too early ... but then again being ambitious is good.

I'm starting to regret my flippancy on the M8 earlier - there may well still be people stuck out there!

G.

Ooops .... 'thousands of people' still out there, stuck on Scotland's roads. M80, M74 and A8 at least. Not good.

[Jon]

Might be worth planning to go via a nuc-type method first if you are wanting to increase, and maybe fiddle with an Apidea or two as an experiment?
G.

Hi Gav. I do both. If I have the spare bees I always make up a nuc and introduce a mated queen or a queen cell about to hatch.
The thing about a nuc - even a two frame nuc, is that you need a minimum of maybe 4000 bees whereas that number of bees would fill 12 apideas with the potential to get 12 mated queens. Realistically speaking 12 Apideas is likely to give you 7 or 8 mated queens due to virgins getting lost or swallowed by swifts.

[Alvearium]

To go back to the grafting; what fixed it finally for me was to get a decent headband magnifier and light. That way you can pick up the smallest larvae possible and really see what you are doing. Also opening a line of cells up helps and getting the queen to lay in fairly new comb makes it all so much easier. If the larvae are hatching in a well fed stock there will be just a little more brood food around with the larvae floating on this. This seems to have just the right viscosity so on touching with the grafting tool the larva is immediately picked up and then touching the base of a plastic receiving cup it slides off beautifully....well more or less. The brown colour of the plastic cup also aids visibilty. Really seeing what you are doing is the key.
How about a 'get together of grafters' in the summer to teach one another our favourite tricks?
Alvearium

[EmsE]

How about a 'get together of grafters' in the summer to teach one another our favourite tricks?
Alvearium

sounds like a great idea.