Made my first set of grafts (ever) on Friday. Opened my Cloakboard hive at the back (with queen in bottom box) to bleed more flyers up to the Cloakboard entrance at the front. Colony doing v well crammed with bees in upper Cloakboard box. Removed one frame with a beautiful supersedure cell on, made up a Nuc. Was made due to queen being in the lower box below the Cloakboard excluder. Rearranged top brood above Cloakboard so 2 good frames pollen, open stores and old larva and sealed brood. Made sure lower box had plenty of room for queen to lay. Slid Cloakboard metal tray in & added grafts.
Checked yesterday afternoon, 24 hours later and 5/10 grafted larva are being built as queen cells, full of royal jelly. Tonnes of pollen and nectar coming in. Filled a super above in last couple of days so glad I left these on as don’t need that many cells. Of the 5 cells that didn’t ‘take’ they all had a rim of wax around the cups suggesting they had started building cells, but changed their mind for whatever reason.
Meanwhile, checked another queen rearing hive, my second colony I am queen rearing from, as lovely dark bees, nice compact brood nest, but very good honey gatherers and low varroa historically. They’ve drawn the 2 Miller frames from foundation. First time I’ve tried this. Queen has laid eggs and I calculated that 1 day old larva should be present on Monday. So will go back in and cut frame back to these youngest larva so some downward facing queen cells can be made. Have de-queened a separate colony that I’ll put the Miller frames in, so just need to remove their emergency cells first.
Will be interesting to see the differences between the 2 methods - Miller and grafts and the 2 different types of cell builder - Cloakboard vs De-queened colony.
My aim is to produce 10-12 high quality queens. Don’t want to over stretch myself and if I achieve 6 nice mated queens I will be v happy.
