Decided to go for cell punching rather than grafting this year
Put an old comb (pupal skins make the cells more rigid and easier to handle) into my breeder queen hive last Sunday. 5 days later (today) some nice 1 day old larva, just changing from eggs, perfect age.
Warmed up my cell punch and selected v young larva and inserted the punches onto my cell bar. These went into my queenless cell builder.
A twist in the tale is last Sunday when I put the queen in the large cage to lay up my cell punch frame, I had to swarm control her - 3 swarm cells in her colony, so I placed her in a box above a Horsely board with the parent colony and supers below it, to make a perfect queenless cell raiser below the board. Took all swarm and emergency cells down today, before inserting the cell punch bar.
Will check progress in a few days
Hopefully the bees will have fed the cells then I can cage them when sealed. Plan to leave one cell in the hive to make a new queen then will put my breeder queen into a Nuc for a rest
Put an old comb (pupal skins make the cells more rigid and easier to handle) into my breeder queen hive last Sunday. 5 days later (today) some nice 1 day old larva, just changing from eggs, perfect age.
Warmed up my cell punch and selected v young larva and inserted the punches onto my cell bar. These went into my queenless cell builder.
A twist in the tale is last Sunday when I put the queen in the large cage to lay up my cell punch frame, I had to swarm control her - 3 swarm cells in her colony, so I placed her in a box above a Horsely board with the parent colony and supers below it, to make a perfect queenless cell raiser below the board. Took all swarm and emergency cells down today, before inserting the cell punch bar.
Will check progress in a few days
![Crossed fingers :fingers_crossed: 🤞](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f91e.png)