Which also bodes well for our site on an August flowering benweed reserve!
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I don't think many will have flown in the past 10-12 days. 19 July was the last decent mating day here.
I did 50 grafts on Wednesday into 3 colonies, 20, 20 and 10.
One started 10, another only 5 and the final one had acquired a virgin between Wednesday and today so started no cells.
Conditions are certainly not ideal and it is raining again today.
If a colony starts no cells at all I always assume it has acquired a virgin from somewhere and I go looking for it.
It had no virgin on Wednesday as it had sealed queen cells on a bar which I removed before inserting the new graft.
It will have flown in from one of the apideas on the site.
This happens quite often if you have queenless colonies and apideas on the same site.
Thanks Kate
There are so many complicated methods around
If you take the queen out of a colony
Graft from the same colony into a cell bar
Leaving the cell bar in the now queenless colony
Won't you get nearly 100% success rate ?
You can put her back later and move the cells above a QX
Just a thought :)
Yep. just remove a queen and insert a frame of grafts from the same colony or any other and you will get plenty started.
I set up a queenless colony in May and it has started about 20-30 cells per week for me since then. I add a couple of frames of brood per week to stop it developing laying workers.
I also start cells in queenright colonies but they do not start as many.
The biggest problem with queen rearing advice is over complicating matters. If you have a really strong queenless colony it will start loads of cells. You need to keep feeding brood to it to stop laying workers developing and also to keep it loaded with nurse bees.
I'm sure they could feed them just like they do in any queen-right finisher but I'm wondering whether they'd start the twenty in the presence of the rest of the brood from which they can choose any larvae they like -ones which haven't been manhandled into cell cups. No matter how good the grafter is I can't believe that it's possible for a grafted larvae to be better than another which, being the same in all other respects, hasn't been grafted.
You may be right prakel but I made a hive queenless knocked off their cells and started 18 out of 20
Course I bungled it and none hatched but that's just one of those things :)
I take your point its probably best to limit the options by removing their queen cells
I think they like vertical cells in preference to making one vertical from the face of the comb
There are more involved methods
Heres a pic of a video I bought some years back
On VHS tape (shows when that was)Attachment 2351
Total palaver no wonder people didn't try to raise their own queens :)
When nurse bees have nothing to nurse they move on to other duties so I will stick my neck out here and say I think its best to have open brood for them to busy themselves with --- probably wrong
Err Jon's your man ask him Lol!