Making up a nuc with a Queen cell

[Wildwood]

Hi,

I wonder if someone can please give me some advice.

I found two unsealed Queen cells yesterday, both will Royal Jelly, and both on the same frame. I did an AS moving the existing Queen into a Nuc with a frame of brood, two of honey, bees from two more frames and two frames of foundation.

It is my intention to leave the QCs for 7 days, and then remove one at that point, leaving one to produce a virgin queen.

Am I able to make up a second Nuc using the QC that I remove and if so, how? I presume that I create a Nuc in the same that I did with the original Queen, but how do I fix the QC into the frame?

Thank you in advance for your help and advice.

 

[BKF Admin]

There are a few ways of doing it.

The 2 ways I use are to very gently remove the Queen cell and either put it on a Culpit kit insert then put that into a roller cage between frames.

Or I push a cocktail stick through the very end and suspend it between frames.

I tend to use the cocktail stick if I am making a Nuc with frames and bees from the original hive and the cage if I am using a Queen cell from a different hive.

What do others do ?

 

[jon]

If I have queen cells I want to rear queens from I leave them as long as possible before moving them, usually in the queenless half of an artificial swarm. If you are lucky you will have four or five frames with a queen cell so all you have to do is place each one in a nuc and add a frame of honey and a frame of brood and young bees from the same colony. 2 frames of bees is enough as you are transferring a queen cell just 2 or 3 days from hatching and the queen will be almost fully developed.
I prefer to add more bees/brood after a queen starts laying.
I also remove queen cells which are on the wood of the frame with a scalpel and put them in roller cages. These can be suspended between two frames of a suitable colony or nuc. Be careful if the suitable colony also contains a queen cell which will hatch earlier as a queen can sting through a roller cage and kill the queen in a cell.

Today I checked a nuc which had 2 queen cells. One had just emerged and was piping and the other was in the cell but had started to chew her way out. I quickly removed the queen cell with the emerging queen and put it in another nuc whose queen cell had failed to hatch. I checked it an hour later and the queen was walking around happily among the workers.

I have 11 nucs with virgin queens at the moment and not an egg in sight yet.