first attempt at grafting..... not a total failure

picton farm · May 17, 2011

On friday I tried to graft for the first time. 40 attempts; 20 in plastic cups and 20 in wax ones I had made. None of the wax ones took but two of the ones in the plastic cups are now sealed. It may not seem like a good sucess rate but I am really chuffed. I think my main mistake was choosing larvae that were a little bit too old. Can i do it with the eggs instead or do they have to have hatched? I am a bit nervous of the really tiny just hatched ones and i kept squishing them.
Any advice welcome......

Poly Hive · May 17, 2011

Your biggest enemy is larvae that are too old.

Easier said than done but get damn good glasses and or a magnifier if your peepers are a bit dodgy and try to graft larvae that are transparent and near impossible to see.

I am serious. Then they are less than 18 hours if not 12 and will be the best you can offer your rearing stock.

Wax cups are easier to graft into as you can press into the surface to slip the tool out.

PH

plumberman · May 17, 2011

I'm no expert, but I had my first go on Sunday. General advice seems to be to use larvae : what I found helped big time was to use a sharp knife to whittle down the cells so that I could get access more easily with my grafting tool. The other problem was getting them off the tool into the cups - what helped again was to have a portion of the larvae hanging off the end of the tool. If you placed this portion first onto the cup, the rest along with the royal jelly seemed to slip happily off the tool.

Oh yes - plenty of light,large magnifying glass AND my reading specs.

There will be others far more experienced no doubt to help....

Busy Bee · Jun 2, 2011

I watched someone grafting a larvae but had a grafting tool which pushed the larvae and into the cup looked pretty straight forward to me.

Busy Bee

Nik · Jul 4, 2011

I have used a Jenter kit this year, I never had much success with grafting. Now that I have transferred the first larvae from the Jenter I can see what my problem was. These young larvae are really small! I had some left over so sat in the house and looked. I could see a range from just hatched eggs to hardly visible C shapes. If that is the kind of thing I should have been grafting then everything I have done was too old.

I know many people say that I should learn to graft properly to save on all sorts of things but to be clear of the age of larvae I cannot beat the Jenter.

Nik