I am going to graft for the first time this year and am really interested in this way of raising my queens in a Q- hive rather than messing around with starter and finisher. What is your prep & process please B+
Do you just remove the queen into a nuc and add more nurse bees and capped brood? Or use just as is? Do you knock down QCs on the original frames on set days etc? Sorry, More info the better please for a newbie at this like me....lol
To be honest,
Michael Palmers YouTube presentation tells you everything you need to know...although I do some of the later stuff slightly differently.
I collect frames of sealed brood with any bees occupying the comb in one of two ways (it doesn't matter which as you accomplish the same thing: a brood chamber full of sealed brood above a queen excluder)
1. raise frames of open brood above a queen excluder on their own colony and move them to the brood box above a queen excluder after 10 days
2. collect frames of open brood and put them in a brood chamber above a queen excluder then wait or 10 days.
The point is that at the end of 10 days, you have no eggs/larvae in that brood chamber (if you do, a queen has somehow been transferred into the box which is no good).
As Michael explained, you have to move the queen-right parent portion and put the queenless nucleus portion (that was above an excluder) on the site formerly occupied by the parent colony - shaking all the bees off the frames and making completely sure there is no emergency queen cells in the box (a queen excluder between the floor and the brood box ensures that a queen returning from a mating flight can't get in after that).
OK. So now you have a hopelessly queenless brood box full of sealed brood and workers on the site formerly occupied by the parent colony. You insert a frame of pollen in the middle and leave a space for a frame containing your grafts....no big difference so far!
You insert your grafts and let the bees cover the frames. I can't stress enough how many bees should be in this box. There should be so many nurse bees in there that the graft frame won't drop down. It just sits on them and descends as they move out of the way ....
Michael demonstrates that here.
This is where the starter-finisher is different from the way I do it. In the starter-finisher, you transfer started cells out of the cell-starter after 24 hours into other queen-right colonies above a queen excluder with frames of open brood on either side and expect this to nurse the cells until they're sealed...and they will, but, you need several finisher colonies for each batch of started cells. I don't do that. I use the same "cell starter" to nurse the cells until they are sealed...then I move them into an incubator until they emerge when I mark them and introduce them to nucs (sealed with queen excluder if I intend to instrumentally inseminate them or open if they are surplus to my needs and I just want them to open mate).
You might think: why on earth does he do all that? Well, think why people use starter-finisher colonies. They want LOTS of started cells (which creates a demand for LOTS of finisher colonies) over a sustained period, possibly all summer long if they add more frames of emerging brood. So, it's a numbers game. Ask yourself, if you really need 2-300 sealed cells? I you do then use starter-finisher colonies. If you don't, consider allowing the same queenless "starter" to raise the cells until they are sealed (a "cell raiser"). There is another reason I do it this way. That is, the diet of a queen larva is not the same as the diet of a worker larva either in composition or quantity. The grafts have everything they need in a cell raiser but moving them to a finisher means they have to share the food produced by nurse bees with worker larvae. Why would you do that? It makes no sense if you are trying to produce the best quality queen cells you can. So, I leave them in the cell raiser until they are sealed, then I move them to my incubator because all that cell raiser can do for the cells is keep them warm. An incubator can do that and I can find other uses for the cell raiser (the nurse bees are approaching the end of their nursing stage and transitioning to other roles within the hive. Of course, I could add sealed brood and add another cycle of nurse bees if I wanted to do it again, or, I could break up the cell raiser and use them to form nucs
