Queen rearing failings

[jeff33]

Last year for my first attempt at grafting I had issues with bees drawing wild comb on the grafting frame. Thanks to tips on here it didn't happen this year and had a clean frame and cells.
Today I checked my mini mating nucs for queen emergence and only 2 out of 7 emerged with the rest being dead. In all the mini nucs with dead pupae the bees had gathered in the food compartment and didn't cluster around the cell or draw the frames.

Bees and cells were left for 48h in the garage to settle. I have decided to try again but going to put all the frames (half SN1) in a modified super above the BB of a full hive for the bees to draw them and the queen to lay in them. That way I hope I can populate the nucs properly to ensure better success.

Is there anything else that I should consider or others can recommend please?

 

[jaybee76]

I make sure that the food compartment is full so that there is no room for them to cluster in there or at other times I've blocked it off with insulation tape and left some fondant in the brood area sufficient to last for the period of confinement.

 

[jeff33]

Thanks Jaybee, I will try that as well.

 

[gp125john]

How long prior to emergence did you put the cells in the mating nuc?

I use a good strong queenright cell builder colony to draw out the queen cells in a national broodbox above a queen excluder. Make sure there are a few frames of young larvae in there to draw the nurse bees up and a good pollen frame next to the queen cells.

As soon as they are capped I put the little hair roller cages on, each with a little bit of honey in the bottom for the queen to eat when she emerges.

About 1-2 days before the queens are due to emerge, i put them in the mini nucs, complete with the hair roller cage.

Make sure you put plenty of bees off a frane with young brood into the nuc as quite a few will defect to a stronger colony.

2 days later, you should have a nice queen in the hair roller cage, release her and then check a week after that there are still enough bees in there, top up if needed.

By adding the queen cell late, most of the development is already done in the cell builder, so I'm not relying too much on the mini nuc to keep the queen cell at exactly the right temperature.

This seems to work well for me.

The other method I use is instead of mini nucs, make a few 3 frame nuc boxes or use the 2 in 1 poly nucs to use as mating nucs. In each one put 2 frames of mainly sealed brood and bees plus a frame of stores.

 

[jeff33]

Thanks, I used the same set-up, usually a hive I have demaree with a couple of added brood frames if necessary. I transferred them to the mini nuc at day 12 as the cells were not caged and didn't want to risk it in case I had grafted slightly older larvae. Dead pupae were well advanced, maybe 3-4 days left before emergence.

Thanks for the good tips both, gonna give it another go next week.