Hair curlers for queen cells

[mbc]

Statistically you're better off hatching in an incubator and introducing a virgin into mini nucs if they're fresh, ie. introducing your virgins to a cupful of disoriented broodless bees, it's pretty close though, as soon as you've harvested the first mated queens it's much safer introducing cells to restock the nucs, rather than getting bees to accept a strange virgin.
(All imho from my observation for a relatively small sample size of a few hundred queens a season)
Agree with Rolande on the cell protection in that I've found it unnecessary in practice, they rarely don't like a good cell.

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

Statistically you're better off hatching in an incubator and introducing a virgin into mini nucs if they're fresh, ie. introducing your virgins to a cupful of disoriented broodless bees, it's pretty close though, as soon as you've harvested the first mated queens it's much safer introducing cells to restock the nucs, rather than getting bees to accept a strange virgin.
(All imho from my observation for a relatively small sample size of a few hundred queens a season)

You're not the only one to notice that. I think Jolanta at Denrosa does the same, first lot of mating nucs get a run in virgin, then from there on she introduces queen cells

 

[Swarm]

The sensible approach once you start replacing batches.

 

[madasafish]

I use an incubator as early Spring weather here can be fickle with late frosts leading to Q dying in QCs in mini nucs.

As for multiple QR in mini nucs, our season is just long enough for two rounds. After July, wasps.

I always struggle early Spring having enough bees to populate mini nucs. This year I have more jumbo Lang 5-6 frame nucs to feed them (hopefully). But it is all on a very small scale 20- 40 queens at most.