- Joined
- Apr 10, 2010
- Messages
- 11,422
- Reaction score
- 3,172
- Location
- Stoke on Trent
- Hive Type
- Langstroth
- Number of Hives
- 6 to 8 Langstroth jumbos, a few Langstroth and National nucs.
What do you experienced queen raisers do with your queen less colonies once you've gone through multiple rounds of grafts? Do you simply unite or shake out?
Last year when I used a queen less colony as a cell builder, I had problems at the end uniting the queen less bees to another colony. They were definitely queen less (tried a test frame) and still had sealed brood, so no laying workers, but they would not accept a new queen. Even taking precautions such as uniting over newspaper, caging the queen on the comb etc.
Cloake board : two Lang jumbo 5 frame nucs. Easy to lift. Q in bottom nuc. Add new capped brood from other nucs to make extra strong. (Equivalent to National double brood)
(Two lang jumbo full broods are just too heavy for an aged wimp.)