newportbuzz
Field Bee
- Joined
- Aug 11, 2010
- Messages
- 846
- Reaction score
- 1
- Location
- newport co,mayo ireland
- Hive Type
- National
- Number of Hives
- 19 through the winter
wow what a day i had yesterday.
i had finaly finsihed my reading on grafting and had decided to try it for myself. so i made up my top bar with the cups and put it into one of my colonys for the smell of bees to get onto it. i then relaxed as it would be another day or two before i needed to do any thing and two weeks before i needed apidea or anything like that.
THEN i get a phone call from a friend inviting me to look through his hives with him so all is going well when we find some queen cells so he was going to rub the spare ones out so i asked him for them instead. this happened twice so i was looking like walking home with about 12 queens cells at purple eye stage. i was chuffed and rang home to get the incubator started up. then we came to the last colony.
we opened them up. normaly they are a fairly spitefull bunch but tpoday for some reason they are quiet as lambs. we are going through the hive and see on the 3rd frame in 3 open queen cells and bees clustered on a further 4 cells. so me moved the bees aside and sure enough a virgin poped out. to be quickly caught by us we keep this up till we had caught 10 virgins.
so here is little me who thought he would try his hand at grafting to get a bit of late increase with 1 dozen queen cells in the incubator and 6 virgins to my name. the phone went beserk trying to secure enough apidea so i got them and stocked them and now i have 6 apidea in my shed and whats better than all that the weather forcast is suposed to be very good for when they will be flying.
i had finaly finsihed my reading on grafting and had decided to try it for myself. so i made up my top bar with the cups and put it into one of my colonys for the smell of bees to get onto it. i then relaxed as it would be another day or two before i needed to do any thing and two weeks before i needed apidea or anything like that.
THEN i get a phone call from a friend inviting me to look through his hives with him so all is going well when we find some queen cells so he was going to rub the spare ones out so i asked him for them instead. this happened twice so i was looking like walking home with about 12 queens cells at purple eye stage. i was chuffed and rang home to get the incubator started up. then we came to the last colony.
we opened them up. normaly they are a fairly spitefull bunch but tpoday for some reason they are quiet as lambs. we are going through the hive and see on the 3rd frame in 3 open queen cells and bees clustered on a further 4 cells. so me moved the bees aside and sure enough a virgin poped out. to be quickly caught by us we keep this up till we had caught 10 virgins.
so here is little me who thought he would try his hand at grafting to get a bit of late increase with 1 dozen queen cells in the incubator and 6 virgins to my name. the phone went beserk trying to secure enough apidea so i got them and stocked them and now i have 6 apidea in my shed and whats better than all that the weather forcast is suposed to be very good for when they will be flying.
excellent news
