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Queen breeding specialism discussion forum.
 #5071  by Chrisbarlow
 22 Oct 2019, 14:41
What's your preferred method of raising queen cells?

I use a 6 over 6 nucs, keep it queenless, add frames of sealed brood and stores when required and add grafts in. Leave for 24hours and then move grafts to queen rite cell finisher.
 #5075  by AdamD
 23 Oct 2019, 18:15
I have never felt the need for a cell-builder; so I do it all in one box.
Unless there is a colony that's at the right point (i.e. one that's just attempted to swarm and is queenless), I use a queenright colony with the queen in the lower brood box and the brood and the queencells in the top brood box with a super or two in between. (From bottom to top, floor/brood box with queen on one frame/excluder/super x 2/excluder/brood food and grafts/crown board/feeder). The idea is that the top brood box is sufficiently far enough away from the queen that the workers will naturally make supercedure cells. These can be removed and grafts put in from a selected queen. When the queencells are ready, they can go into nucs or perhaps mini-nucs with bees from supers from other hives or bees from the hive that's just raised them.
 #5077  by Chrisbarlow
 23 Oct 2019, 21:11
AdamD wrote:
23 Oct 2019, 18:15
I have never felt the need for a cell-builder; so I do it all in one box.
Unless there is a colony that's at the right point (i.e. one that's just attempted to swarm and is queenless), I use a queenright colony with the queen in the lower brood box and the brood and the queencells in the top brood box with a super or two in between. (From bottom to top, floor/brood box with queen on one frame/excluder/super x 2/excluder/brood food and grafts/crown board/feeder). The idea is that the top brood box is sufficiently far enough away from the queen that the workers will naturally make supercedure cells. These can be removed and grafts put in from a selected queen. When the queencells are ready, they can go into nucs or perhaps mini-nucs with bees from supers from other hives or bees from the hive that's just raised them.
so a modification on the dameree method of swarm control. cheers Adam.

What strain of bees do you have? local, or predominantly any other and what percentage of grafts do you find take?
 #5080  by AdamD
 24 Oct 2019, 08:56
Mine are local girls - I simply breed from what I perceive is the best queen or two each year. The idea is that, as I have a fair number of drones over 2 or sometimes 3 apiaries, they will feature fairly well in the mating mix but not enough to have any inbreeding as there will be other colonies around and about and the drones from them will give genetic diversity. I have sea a couple of miles to the east and a wide stretch of marsh or water to the north and west which is not good bee territory, so I would hopefully not see too many drones from a really large area as they would be inhibited from traveling across these. I've no idea where DCA's are though.

Grafts are a funny thing - I will report the same thing as you may have read elsewhere that if they are put in too early in the hive in spring or at the first attempt in a colony, the results can be very poor. Obviously if the colony is no way ready to produce queens - i.e. there are not drones in the hive which can be considered the first part of swarm preparation, they won't play ball. Other than that, I guess an average is 80% take-up - usually 9 are done at a time. Occasionally it's 100%. I think it depends on how clumsy I am with the paint brush I use for the larval transfer. I think it's fair to say - and I have no evidence to back this up, just anecdotal, that the take-up is generally better in a queenless colony that a queenright one. I guess that makes sense, as if we are talking about using the the supercedure impulse with a queenright colony compared to the emergency impulse with a queenless one, the bees won't really want to make loads of queencells.