Starting a jenter cycle

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MJBee

Drone Bee
Joined
Dec 4, 2008
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Location
Dordogne 24360 France
Hive Type
Commercial
Number of Hives
16 a mix of Commercial, National, 14 x 12, Dadant and a Warre
sorry
 
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Flood the carb, close the air slide, retard the ignition. bring the piston to TDC on compression, pull in valve lifter, get piston to just past TDC and give it one healthy kick.
I always find it is best to sit astride, with the machine level and on the center stand.
 
Starting a jenter cycle

Have you tried that "Start, You B*****d!" fluid?
You know, the one you sent me the video of? :spy:
 
Oh Dear it was an ID ten error. I accidentally "submitted" the message twice and was told so. I deleted one and quess which message came up!!

What I meant to say was:-

With a forecast 7 days of decent weather I put the Jenter cage into the "Queen mother" colony to get their scent. Finding the queen tomorrow will be a challenge as his is a huge colony and it working the broom- yellow bees and marked yellow queen. All part of life's rich etc.

Amazing the train of thoughts that "starting a jenter cycle" generated - lol
 
On the subject of jenter. I placed my 3 yr old breeder queen in jenter box last wednesday evening and returned 4 days later on sunday expecting to find some one day old larvae in the plugs. However there were only eggs in the plugs (she had laid in every one but obviously didn't lay on the 1st day as nothing had hatched. Nevertheless I introduced a bar of 10 plugs with eggs into each of two cell raisers. People told me that the bees would eat the eggs as they only accept larvae. I went back to check today (tuesday) and was amazed to find that 7 had been accepted in one cell raiser and 6 in the other ie 65% acceptance rate using eggs. Has anyone else tried using just eggs?
 
I tried ages ago to get sense out of FERA on the importation of bee eggs from Eire (laid up in bespoke small combs) for queen breeding . Gave up in the end. In the literature it works. Apparently. Depends on the state of the colony and the strain you are working with?
 
On the subject of jenter. I placed my 3 yr old breeder queen in jenter box last wednesday evening and returned 4 days later on sunday expecting to find some one day old larvae in the plugs. However there were only eggs in the plugs (she had laid in every one but obviously didn't lay on the 1st day as nothing had hatched. Nevertheless I introduced a bar of 10 plugs with eggs into each of two cell raisers. People told me that the bees would eat the eggs as they only accept larvae. I went back to check today (tuesday) and was amazed to find that 7 had been accepted in one cell raiser and 6 in the other ie 65% acceptance rate using eggs. Has anyone else tried using just eggs?

Yes as it happens - a week or so ago as an experiment. 3 out of 8 were accepted into a Q- colony so not so good as you. Now whether they were 'on the turn' and became larvae soon after transfer I don't know. They grafted quite easily on the brush. I did move some cupkit eggs to a colony 2 or 3 years ago and they were accepted better.
 
Following on from previous post. On Monday by which time eggs had hatched in the Jenter box I introduced 20 plugs on one frame, each with a 1 day old larvae in it, into a cell raiser belonging to another beekeeper . This evening (wednesday) we found 15 had been accepted (75% acceptance). Sample sizes are of course small but it seems you only get 10% better acceptance using 1 day old larvae. Next week is going to be Apidea week as we have to find a home for all these queen cells.
 
Next week is going to be Apidea week as we have to find a home for all these queen cells.

One of the downsides of the Jenter is the temptation to do something with each and every one of the 100-ish plugs!
 
Not a problem actually as we have 20 Apideas and a dozen standard frame nucs and only 28 queen cells. We have 60 colonies between us so we certainly need that many queens (and more) but of course by the time mating is complete and we see sealed brood I don't suppose we will get more than 20 successfuly mated queens (may even be as low as 50% success rate). Must expect a few to abscond from the Apideas, a few to go missing (eaten by birds or get lost on orientation flights) and there may be a few poorly mated queens that need to be culled (hopefully not as bad as last year) not forgetting a few lost on introduction to the main colonies.
 

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