Stupid Question.. If I want to get started...

[Neils]

What are the little plastic cups called? I was looking at both Thornes and Maisemore trying to price up getting going on the queen raising front and I couldn't figure out what it was I actually want.

I thought I'd go the simple route to start with and that method seemed pretty straight forward, stick a couple of wooden bars in a frame, stick the little plastic cups into some holes and graft some larvae into them.

[Calum]

Hi
this is the page you want to look at in Thornes (https://secure.thorne.co.uk/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/millhouse/thorne/shop/springer?ACTION=thispage&THISPAGE=page10110.html&ORDER_ID=290756090)
I can recommend getting a chinese grafting tool aswell.
Or maisemore (http://www.bees-online.co.uk/view.asp?ID=913)
Thornes has both Jenter (my personal favorite) and nicot systems. But judging by their product description they have not worked out how the jenter works (the unribbed yellow sockets are placed in holes in the bar and mate to the ribbed ones for easy transfer/removal from bars)!

[Jimbo]

Hi Nellie,

You can make it easier on yourself and buy the Cupkit system that comes with 10 sets of bits or you can buy the bits on their own if you just want to graft. I have a contact for a company that I will post when I get to my other computer. You may find them cheaper than Thornes

[Jon]

Buzzy Bee shop has the best prices.
I always use them.

http://www.buzzybeeshop.co.uk/page9.html

I haven't used cupkit but those who have used cupkit and have done grafting usually reckon grafting is far quicker and far less hassle.
We had a grafting session on monday evening and some who tried could not even see the small larvae so it is maybe horses for courses.
I can graft 20 larvae in 10 minutes, no queens to catch and cage or anything like that.
It is something which gets better with practice. last year I was having 10/20 started on average and this year it is more like 18/20.
The critical thing is the state of the colony the grafts go into. If the colony is wrong it will not start cells irrespective of whether they began as cupkit, or larvae on the end of a paintbrush.

[Jimbo]

Hi Nellie,

Jon beat me to it. I also use the Buzzybeeshop.
I have used both the Cupkit and Jenter system as well as grafting. The Jenter was one of the original older systems. I found it a bit fiddly with too many bits. For grafting I had to use a magnifying headband I grafted into wax cups as well as the Cupkit cups. I found it was less hassle using the Cupkit cups than making your own wax cups. By far the easier breeding system for my situation is the Cupkit system. All of the systems will work so it is what you prefer. The Cupkit system does have a few tweeks you need to know about to get it to work. The first is you need to get the hive scent on the frame. My first attempt I left it in the donor hive for a few days after spraying it with sugar solution. The queen did not lay readily. As the system gets older and used more the queen seems more readily to lay. When you have finished using the frame don't clean it the bees will do this for you. It is recommended to leave the queen in the frame for 24hr. In my experience the queen does not lay in this 24 hrs but I still check for eggs and usually leave a further 24hrs if no eggs are seen. It is easy to check for eggs.( I use the yellow cup holder to lift the brown cups out the back of the frame when checking). I then leave 3 days and again check the eggs have hatched and the bees have place a little brood food in the cup. I then take these 1 day old larvae using the yellow cup holder and place these on the brown adaptors attached on a frame and place in a queenless colony. I usually do 10 cells at a time but you could potentially produce up to a 100 queen cells if you have enough colonies. The fully formed cells are easy to detach from the queen frame and inserted into an apidea.

[Karin]

I tried grafting and Cupkit system and I found Cupkit easier, quicker and with a higher take rate. Grafting was cheaper though, which was just the cost of a tool and a strong head torch but there was the faff of making the cups from wax....

[Jimbo]

You can just purchase a set of 10 cups and holders for about £5.00 and graft straight into these without the faff of making your own wax cups which also need to be made fresh for best results

[Neils]

Buzzy Bee shop has the best prices.
I always use them.

http://www.buzzybeeshop.co.uk/page9.html

I haven't used cupkit but those who have used cupkit and have done grafting usually reckon grafting is far quicker and far less hassle.
We had a grafting session on monday evening and some who tried could not even see the small larvae so it is maybe horses for courses.
I can graft 20 larvae in 10 minutes, no queens to catch and cage or anything like that.
It is something which gets better with practice. last year I was having 10/20 started on average and this year it is more like 18/20.
The critical thing is the state of the colony the grafts go into. If the colony is wrong it will not start cells irrespective of whether they began as cupkit, or larvae on the end of a paintbrush.

That looks about right. I was going to try path of least resistance. The cartridge system is ok, but I worry about time to get back and let her out again hence preferring to try grafting. The 30 queen kit plus a grafting tool or two looks a reasonable place to start.

I'd originally intended to try and keep it really simple this year by taking Nucs from Artificial swarms but the way things have panned out this year has made me regret somewhat that I hadn't taken the plunge sooner.

Might be a step too far for this season but I'll certainly be going for it next year.

[Jimbo]

Nellie,

I would recommend you just give it a go. I was not successful at first but it was a great learning curve and I enjoyed it. There is no greater feeling when it all comes together and you can repeat the process year after year.
You are right if you just buy a pack of the cupkit cups the yellow adapters and the brown cell frame adaptors plus a graft tool you can't get it any simpler. All you need is a queenless colony (Keep feeding with syrup when you have placed in the larvae on the frame)
The fun then starts all over again when you have all these queen cells and you wonder what to do with them!

[Neils]

I'd considered that and was even budgeting for 5-6 mating nucs/apideas.

I'd put this off because I thought it was really difficult, or at least intimidating and that I needed much more experience before I tried raising queens in any kind of organised manner and that therefore taking splits from Artificial swarms into Nucs was going to be a straightforward route to go down. If I'd taken the plunge then knowing what I know now; that it's not actually that difficult, I'd probably be in a much better situation that I am at the moment where 50% of my colonies will do well to build up for winter.

Live and learn as they say.

[drumgerry]

This last few weeks (at our association apiary) we've had our first go at queen rearing with yours truly setting the pace. Talk about a steep learning curve! I've had one go at grafting and learned a few things in particular. First was I didn't like the grafting tool I had - a cranked one from Thornes which was far too fiddly. So I've now bought a nice Swiss one from Buzzybeeshop which is tailored to me being a leftie which is nice. Also I've gone off using the wax cups I made - they were a faff and too easy to knock off the cell bar when getting organised for grafting. So the next attempt will be with the JZBZ cups which have the oval stalk on the end. By all accounts the bees like them every bit as much as the wax ones.

I've been trying to document the process at our blog http://www.moraybeekeepers.co.uk/blog/ but haven't put the latest instalment in yet. We checked yesterday and my first set of grafts resulted in 6 sealed queen cells from about 20 larvae grafted. When we had looked 24 hours after grafting the acceptance rate looked better than that but the bees only went ahead with the 6 larvae. A bit disappointing but onwards and upwards!

Gerry

[Calum]

Two tips:
put a queen excluder in front of the hive raising the queens. (prevents stray queens flying in)
Before adding the queen cells to be raised place a frame of young larve in the queenless colony to really get the juices flowing. (increases uptake rate)
Oh, and feed.

[Neils]

Thinking about it, the one thing we didn't cover at the recent workshop is what to do with the cells once they're going.

So lets assume I've grafted a bunch of cells in that whatever method I choose (cupkits, cups on a frame etc) and they've taken. Now what do I do with them?

Do I wait until they're capped?

How do I move them off the frame of queen cells into an Apidea? is there a special frame or do I just basically wedge it into a bit of comb where it wont fall out and then leave it?

As a slight offtopic I've heard (that should have people slapping heads already) that apideas aren't great for the quality of queens that result, is this curmudgeonly beekeeper rumour?

[Jon]

They are capped after 4 days and they will hatch 8 days after that.
Two days before hatch date put rollers over the cells and put them in the apideas 1 day before hatching. If they go into the apideas too early they get chilled and don't hatch.
The apidea has an inner cover with a flap in it and the cell is inserted through this hole and the lugs of the cell cup hold it in place between the two frames below.

The people who say apideas produce poor queens are generally the beekeepers who are clumsy and cannot manipulate 12 hour old larvae or mini nuc frames. Some queens will be good and some will turn out poor no matter what method you use. There are a lot of variables such as weather, and nutrition and age of grafted larva, and the quality and quantity or drones encountered, etc. Some of my best and biggest queens were grafted into artificial cells and mated in apideas. looking at the current batch of 10 queens mated in apideas there is one not much bigger than a worker but some are as big as any queens you are likely to see.

If you get a colony to start and rear 5 queens they will be bigger than if you get the colony to start and rear 30.

[Adam]

I've grafted into the little brown cups, rather than make wax ones with dowelling, however this year I used the cupkit kit and it works well. Age it taking it's toll and as I need glasses to graft - which is a faff under a veil - and there is a risk that you'll get a big larva (cos it's easier!) it's cupkit for me from now on.

If you graft into cupkit cups they can be stuck onto a bar with wax and cut off with a stanley knife with a wax tab to jam into some comb. Queens close to emergence are much more hardy than larvae so they should be kept in the 'big' hive until nearly done. I haven't yet left it too late and had a mass of virgins all over the place!

Screw cupkit onto a frame top bar and add something at the sides (I used hardboard with wax splodged over it).
Put cupkit into hive for a day to be cleaned up and prepared by the bees.
Then put queen in under the excluder. A day (or two) later the queen will have laid in the cups (you can see through them enough to see the white egg)
Release the queen and push the cups into the holders that are on a frame bar. it seems a shame to waste the other 90 eggs....
Place in a queenless colony or - as I have done place in a hive with queen in bottom brood box. Then excluder. Then a super or two. Then the remaining brood in the uppermost brood box. Lots of young bees, a pollen frame and feed syrup. (Queenright queenrearing).


In summary, the cupkit is a doddle.

[Adam]

Mini-nucs are fine to get queens mated. I think it correct that you'll lose more than in a nuc though where there are more bees.
The quality of the queen will be no less in my view.

[Jon]

I checked some more apideas this evening and found another 7 queens laying, 5 of mine and two from other members of the queen rearing group.
Of the first 16 apideas I set out with queen cells, I have got 15 mated queens so there is certainly nothing wrong with the mini nuc as a way of getting queens mated.

[Jimbo]

Hi Nellie,

To help you get the timings right in producing queen cells using the cupkit system you can download an Excel sheet called Tom's Tables from the BIBBA web site. It is easy to produce the queen cells the problem is what do you do with them. I place the queen cell a day before it is due to hatch into mini nucs as opposed to nucs as you use less bees to get the queen mated.On my first attempt using mini nucs I got a 70% success rate last year.

[Jon]

Last year my success rate with the apideas was under 50% as a lot of queens went missing.
I have them at my own apiary this year so can keep more of an eye on them.

[Neils]

Thanks for the advice, the shopping list is coming together nicely though a bit too late for this year.

So in terms of mating Nucs/Apideas are there any particular ones that people feel are good or bad.

[Jimbo]

I use Swi-Bine as well as Apidea's. The Swi-Bine is cheaper but not as well engineered as the Apidea. Both work well and take 250ml of bees. The Swi-Bine does not have a separate feed section so it can be harder to fill the feeder if required. Both can be purchased from the Buzzybee shop

[fatshark]

I've used Kielers from Modernbeekeeping ... they are a little bigger than Apidea's and you can buy a 'super' for them. I've had 100% mating success with them this year and, after taking out some of the queens, have united the remaining ones into double-deckers which I can keep until late summer (or even overwinter) for re-queening whenever needed. You need to add a thick plastic sheet crown board. It's a simple top-bar design, but once the comb is well drawn it's pretty robust. Oh yes, much less expensive than Api's as well ;-)