First cells hatched 2012

[Jon]

I had a couple of queens emerge today in apideas.
24 hours early, must be the heat as they were grafted from small larvae.

[Calum]

Well done, all my attempts have been fruitless so far. Just single queens in my (whatever you call it when you put three frames of bees and brood in a new box). Gone up from 7 to 21 colonies so far, so not too bad..

[Jon]

Just back in from our queen rearing group meeting.
We have about 35 members now.
Tonight I demonstrated how to do an artificial swarm on a colony I found queen cells in two days ago.
No point in people taking home fancy dan queens if they don't know how to prevent them leaving in a swarm.

We also put rollers on over 60 grafted cells which are due to hatch on Sunday.

I want to put the cells in apideas either Friday night or Saturday morning at the latest.
There were about 25 apideas loaded with bees dropped off.
I have about 20 of my own still to fill so there will be no problem getting rid of all the cells.

Hope to graft a load more this weekend, time permitting.

[gavin]

It is great to see new season queens again. I have hatched cells from natural queen cells, a fine sight. Will start grafting this weekend so that we can have a show and tell on 16th June at the association meeting.

[Jon]

Yes it is very rewarding when you graft 20 larvae and get most of them started as queens and even better when you check the apideas and find the queens have emerged successfully. An even bigger kick when you find they have mated and started laying. Plenty of setbacks as well so you have to make the most of it when things are looking good.

1080

[The Drone Ranger]

Hi guys what are you doing with all these queens you only need one per hive

[gavin]

I just keep stuffing mine in the front door until the hive can't take any more ....

.... naw, requeening the nastier stocks, the swarmier stocks, the less productive stocks, and the less native-looking stocks is my aspiration.

[Jon]

Hi guys what are you doing with all these queens you only need one per hive

I am putting my spare ones in aviation fuel to manipulate the earth's climate.

[Meg]

Ha Ha Jon - what a waste. Flog 'em and use the dosh to pay for the aviation fuel - or even the car stuff for that matter!

Got 15 out of 20 due to be put in apidea's on Sunday. Reasonable result, but my earlier ones are varying from mated and laying nicely to crawling around the backyard clearly not at all right - bummer - the bees at the time or have they been spryed or what? Those ones would have been grafted late April just after the convention when admittedly it was somewhat chilly but they hatched out and looked alright. Sigh. No knowing with bees.

Meg

[Jon]

There is a stage in development where the wings are very easily damaged by chilling. There were people tonight who wanted to put cells in their apideas, 3 days before emergence but I think it is better to use rollers and try and move the cells to the apideas about 24 hours before emergence when the queens are fully formed.

Cars are overrated if you can get someone to give you a lift from time to time.

[gavin]

It'll be those neonics, Meg.

[Meg]

I'll ignore that for the time being Gavin - need to go to sleep.

Meanwhile, the queens looked perfectly normal, fully formed, nice size, wings perfect - and I did look blooming hard just in case, but just didn't seem to be able to get airborne more than a foot or so. Time will tell - 3 apideas at home and the rest elsewhere, so if these 3 all fail from the same batch then maybe worth investigating further. There agin life is too short a the moment and not enough time to clean my teeth (euphemism?) let alone worry about the odd queen or 3.

Night all.

Meg

[The Drone Ranger]

Anybody raising buckfast queens ?

[Meg]

Sorry Gavin - realised that looked very abrupt - just meant potnetial long discussion for another day....

Meg

[Jon]

Anybody raising buckfast queens ?

The ghost of brother Adam. the rest are yellow mongrels!

[The Drone Ranger]

I think I might have a go wooooooo!!

[Jon]

A monk reincarnated as a masked man.
Heard of stranger scenarios, Rosie's waggle dancing anti narcotic bees for example.

[The Drone Ranger]

Lol only kidding most years I have more queens than I could ever need

[Jimbo]

DR flog a few to help pay your SBA conference fee or in Jon's case help pay for the beer when comes over for the visit!

[fatshark]

Half a dozen grafts going into Kielers tonight. Getting the bees into the mini-nucs was not pleasant ... Cool, windy day with light rain. Perfect conditions to find everyone home, making the queen trickier to find and the entire colony downright resentful of being messed about. Learnt my lesson the hard way, but two beesuits provided sufficient protection in the final collection stages.

All busy roaring in the garage ...

[kevboab]

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.

[Jon]

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.

[gavin]

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.

[Jon]

- do cages encourage chilling of the queen cell? Can the workers get at them to warm them?

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.
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.

[fatshark]

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 :)

[mbc]

- 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.

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.

[Jon]

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 (http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/showthread.php?568-apidea-management-and-grafting-photos/page2) 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.

[mbc]

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.

[prakel]

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.

[mbc]

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.

[Jon]

I think working out some way to overwinter queens successfully in fairly small units is key to stopping the mania for early queen imports with all that entails - risk of a new disease, stirring up the gene pool at the expense of established populations etc.
I overwintered 4 queens in double apideas but last winter was far milder than usual.
Several members of my bka overwintered queens in single apideas including some of the beginners.

I think it is really worthwhile monitoring the apideas as closely as time permits in terms of increasing your percentage of queens reared.
You can lose queens due to starvation or absconding due to overpopulation and wasp attack from late July on.
I had to move a load of apideas with mated queens last august as the wasps had started to pick them off one by one.

[prakel]

...I suspect for my minimalist intervention approach I might have more luck with a slightly bigger unit.

Hi MBC, one thing I should mention is that although I was very pleased with the single boxes as winter units it did create work during the second half of April -started to get crowded before I had justifiable use for the queens elsewhere- so by the start of May I had to resort to shaking a few odd frames out in front of standard nucs to eleveate some of the pressure where if I'd over-wintered combined boxes that would not have been an issue. If I had a lot more of the Mini-plus hives I think that I could use this April/May bottle-neck to my own advantage for creating bee-bombs a la Mike Palmer (similar, I imagne, to what Jon is doing with his apdea's).

[mbc]

Just googled bee bombs and it sounds similar to a system of boosting stocks for the heather I was shown by an old hand years ago. In my experience you tend not to get "value for money" (or if we're continuing with americanisms and explosions, "bang for your buck") from such manipulations and the hassle of doing it and the disruption of colonies doesnt outweigh any perceived benefits.

[prakel]

It strikes me that it could work to good effect with regards to keeping single box Mini-plus hives under control while boosting standard over wintered nucs as a side benefit. For myself I like to try to avoid restocking the Mini hives by maintaining them as on going units from year to year which means that there is no benefit in removing an over wintered queen (unless it's to save a full sized colony) untill the year's first round of new queen cells are in production. It's a bit of a juggle -using the over wintered queens to keep the mini hives going up to the point that they're once more ready to be put into use as mating hives while not allowing them to get too far ahead. None of this hassle when I've combined them in the autumn, but half as many 'spare' queens.

[funfly]

A question..
When a new queen starts her mating flights, do they take place over a few days or is just one good weather day enough?
When she has mated, how long before laying and would she ever continue her mating as she starts her laying?

[Geo224]

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 :)

Did the cell finisher swarm because of the grafts you put in?

[Jon]

Hi funfly, welcome to the forum.


A question..
When a new queen starts her mating flights, do they take place over a few days or is just one good weather day enough?
When she has mated, how long before laying and would she ever continue her mating as she starts her laying?

1. There can be several mating flights over a few days if she does not mate with enough drones although it is perfectly possible that complete mating takes place in a single flight.

2. In my experience you see eggs about 2 days after a mating flight. This is based upon queens I have retrieved which have landed short of an apidea and have bees clustered around them, so I know the exact timing of the mating flight.

3. When a queen has started laying she will not take any more mating flights.

[funfly]

Many thanks Jon

[gavin]

Does this aspect of beekeeping particularly interest you, funfly? I have three Apideas on the go a few miles to the east of you now, and will be preparing a demo of grafting and queen raising for Sat 16th June at the association meeting near Longforgan.

[fatshark]

Did the cell finisher swarm because of the grafts you put in?

I doubt it ... I'd knocked back a QC when setting up the box and so suspect they had decided to swarm anyway. I subsequently found two occupied cells, unsealed. It's possible they swarmed earlier because of the sealed cells in the top box, but not just because there were grafts there.

[Adam]

Hi funfly, welcome to the forum.



1. There can be several mating flights over a few days if she does not mate with enough drones although it is perfectly possible that complete mating takes place in a single flight.

2. In my experience you see eggs about 2 days after a mating flight. This is based upon queens I have retrieved which have landed short of an apidea and have bees clustered around them, so I know the exact timing of the mating flight.

3. When a queen has started laying she will not take any more mating flights.

I can confirm 2 days to lay after mating. In a brief break in the cold weather a few weeks ago, the temperature here touched 21 degrees - for one day only. Looking at some colonies a few days later, eggs were present indicating that 1 day was enough and the queens had started to lay pretty much 2 days after that warm day.

[funfly]

Does this aspect of beekeeping particularly interest you, funfly? I have three Apideas on the go a few miles to the east of you now, and will be preparing a demo of grafting and queen raising for Sat 16th June at the association meeting near Longforgan.

Yes, interested in having a bash at grafting and queen rearing.
I did make a split on the 8/5/12 and expected to see evidence of a new queen laying when I check two days ago, but not eggs.

I have the 16th marked in my diary, I'll be there, mug in hand for the promised cup of tea too.