rainbow mating nucs

[Poly Hive]

Thank you Pete. Mobus taught that too.

PH

 

[madasafish]

Something worth mentioning with all these mini-nucs is not to place in direct sunshine if possible. They seem very poor at heat regulation and I find they tend to abscond when overheating.

I use a wooden sheet above to shield from sun..

 

[deemann1]

Are the rainbow nucs stackable can you add a box on top ??

 

[Cuckmere couple]

being a little thick

i had got my head around introducing a q cell to some bees to hatch out and then mate etc

but start with a virgin is confusing me

whats all that about?

you have another nuc or colony somewhere with a q cell and when it hatches, you intercept and then add to a mini mating nuc?

from my thick understanding, that sounds a bit daft, so it must be that i'm missing something....help me understand what it is?

 

[madasafish]

being a little thick

i had got my head around introducing a q cell to some bees to hatch out and then mate etc

but start with a virgin is confusing me

whats all that about?

you have another nuc or colony somewhere with a q cell and when it hatches, you intercept and then add to a mini mating nuc?

from my thick understanding, that sounds a bit daft, so it must be that i'm missing something....help me understand what it is?

The problem when setting up mini nucs for the first time in the season is - in order to fill the nucs with bees ,preferably young workers and NOT drones - you need to shake them off frames into a BIG box and spray them with water to prevent them flying away. So when you pick up a cupful of bees they will be damp when you put them in a mini nuc. Add a QC and they may not generate enough heat to keep the queen in the QC alive..
If you surround a QC with a cage so that the emerging queen is confined, you can then place here in the mini nuc, pour bees on top of her and not worry about the queen having to emerge from a QC .

 

[Cuckmere couple]

ah....thats helpful

does that mean (apologies if a daft novice question) that you could have more than one q cell hatch in a colony (because the q doesnt get to kill the other q cells) and then take them out into mini nucs?

 

[madasafish]

ah....thats helpful

does that mean (apologies if a daft novice question) that you could have more than one q cell hatch in a colony (because the q doesnt get to kill the other q cells) and then take them out into mini nucs?

yes:this what q rearers do..

 

[Poly Hive]

To obtain the virgins the cells are started, then raised, then allowed to hatch in either top supers (to be away from the queen substance) and or incubators.

The ripe cells are caged so when the virgin emerges she cannot attack the other cells.

All of this is a controlled system and nothing to do with natural emergence, or for that matter swarming.

Required reading is Mating in Miniature by B. Mobus.

PH

 

[Stedic]

Required reading is Mating in Miniature by B. Mobus.

Tricky to find a copy. Amazon has a used one for £70. Other stores seem to have the ISBN muddled with something about the history of bread making.

 

[madasafish]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL3HRd1n53g is useful

 

[Cuckmere couple]

excellent

good video

notice they use capped cells from start

more confident to have a go now

 

[madasafish]

excellent

good video

notice they use capped cells from start

more confident to have a go now

Beware: American seasons are more predictable than ours.. I have seen snow in June here..and during the Chernobyl disaster on 26 April we were caravanning in Kielder and had hailstones the size of walnuts..(dents to car and caravan)

 

[Walrus]

As far as I can tell people use those tiny mating nucs mainly because they are raising a lot of queens. A scoop of bees in a mini nuc is an efficient use of resources for them.

I prefer to use full sized frames in a 3 frame nuc for matings. It means breaking up a colony to make nucs. Probably no good if I wanted to scale up to 50+ queens a year (which isn't a lot) but for my needs it works fine. No special gear and they could over-winter in 3 frame nucs if required.

 

[SDM]

Written specifically for apidea, but you wont go far wrong following these instructions.

http://beespoke.info/2013/11/30/apidea-instructions/

 

[mbc]

Beware: American seasons are more predictable than ours.. I have seen snow in June here..and during the Chernobyl disaster on 26 April we were caravanning in Kielder and had hailstones the size of walnuts..(dents to car and caravan)

This.
I remember clearly time and again feeling a degree of failure with my early queen rearing efforts because it simply didn't go as the books kept telling me it would, specifically my virgins refused to mate for a few weeks and so it check after a fortnight expecting to see a few frames layed up with eggs as all the new world literature said they would be only to be disappointed time and again.
Funnily enough last year with it's endless sunshine was the first time in twenty years of raising queens in west Wales the virgins followed the instructions more often than not and got mated nice and promptly.