The Honey Factory

[Egghead_Jr]

Will the roller cage fit on a JZ cell cup? I didn't think they did. Are you just tossing the virgin in a queenless start if she is a day old? I've been wary of using virgins due to the horror stories of acceptance but am coming around to the reality that if they are young enough it's a breeze.

I need to start evaluating virgins and do less of the queen cell colony starts. Too many resources are tied up to be placing random cells in. Culling some prior to mating just makes sense. I already have cell protectors and JZ plastic cages. Have seen people stick the cage to the end of the cell protector.

 

[Apis mellifera]

Will the roller cage fit on a JZ cell cup? I didn't think they did. Are you just tossing the virgin in a queenless start if she is a day old? I've been wary of using virgins due to the horror stories of acceptance but am coming around to the reality that if they are young enough it's a breeze.

I need to start evaluating virgins and do less of the queen cell colony starts. Too many resources are tied up to be placing random cells in. Culling some prior to mating just makes sense. I already have cell protectors and JZ plastic cages. Have seen people stick the cage to the end of the cell protector.

I started grafting with the JZBZ stuff too but it just wasn't versatile enough for me. Its really for the big producers who graft hundreds or thousands of queens. I dont believe there are any roller/hatching cages for them.

I ended up getting the pieces and parts for the no graft or Nicot at Betterbee. They are sold separately. I dont use the queen comb box, I just graft into the brown cell cups. Once the cell is capped you have lots of options. You can take off the yellow cell holders easily and place the cell in a queenless nuc or colony. Or you can let them emerge in the hatching cage. I scoop a cup or two of bees from the starter/finisher put them in a mini and toss in a virgin queen. They always accept her. If you use nurse bees from another hive leave them in the mini overnight in a cool dark place and toss in the virgin queen the next day. In 2 to 3 weeks you have a bunch of laying queens ready to do what you want with. In the photo is the cell cup supports, yellow cell holders, brown cell cups and hatching cages. I use both deep and medium frames for grafting. Ive placed grafts in honey supers and got beautiful cells. During swarm season it doesnt seem to matter. The points on the yellow cell holders are so you can stick them into the comb with a capped cell.

You can round off a couple 5/16" dowels and make cups from your own wax that fit into the yellow cell holders. Let the dowel ends soak in water overnight before dipping into wax. Thats if you dont want to use the plastic cups.

 

[Egghead_Jr]

Was in the garage today and decided to check how well the JZ protector fits the JZBZ cage. Kinda but no. Found where I'd read a person doing that to realize they were laying flat in incubator. Well, that's not going to work.

I will make a wire queen cage to fit the JZBZ cell cups like the image below but won't be as pretty. Likely will roll the wire, pinch and fold the bottom with vice grips then rubber band the top. True back yard mechanic style!

 

[Sally PB]

Most of this is going over my head, but I'm reading anyway. I've bookmarked this to come back to after reading more.

The bee club in our area wants to have some of the meetings geared for the more experience keepers, covering raising queens, doing splits, etc., instead of just managing a hive. Since hubby and I are so new to this, most of the information will be beyond our skill level. I'd like to learn a little bit so that I can at least understand what they're talking about, and file it away for later.

I remember being "this new" to chicken keeping too.

 

[Egghead_Jr]

There are so many ways to make queens and too many people using acronyms to be understandable. In general it all goes back to the basics of the three ways a queen is made, emergency queen cell, supercedure queen cell, and a swarm cell.

Most common would be to have a queenless hive and they would make emergency queens from the young larvae or wait for eggs to become larva. If a person does this intentionally in a separate box and introduces young larva in queen cell cups you'd call that a cell starter. They will feed most of the larva copious amounts of royal jelly. Typically these cell builders are too small to raise all those started cells so the frame is transfered after a day into a large hive over a queen excluder so they finish them off to fully capped cells. That is a cell finisher. The impulse to finish the cells would be supercedure or swarm. That's the gist of it. For small back yard stuff this is typically done with a split. Move the queen out to another box and allow the now queenless hive to raise a new queen. If something happens and the hive does not raise a new mated queen then you can recombine the old queen split into it.

I think one of the best ways to get enough cells for four to six new colonies is called a "fly back split". This is where you move the hive over and place a new bottom board and box in it's place. Put in a honey frame and the frame the queen is on then fill the rest will foundation. All the forage bees will come back to that original location and revert to comb building. It's a forced swarm. The hive that was moved over is packed full of resources and nurse bees that will raise emergency queens. 9 or ten days after doing this go into that hive to find the queen cells. If only wanting a few new colonies take a frame with queen cell on it and put into a new box with resources and nurse bees. You should have cells on multiple frames, leave one, and you've just made an increase of four to six colonies. Easy to do and usually all a back yard person wants to increase. The box with original queen and all the foragers will bounce back and still provide some honey harvest. The rest was divided into what you make up for increases and will become full size colonies before winter. Any colony that does not succeed in producing a mated queen can be combined to another with newspaper between the boxes.

 

[Egghead_Jr]

So what we were talking about was making cell builder colonies and using premade queen cell cups that attach to bars in a frame. Usually multiple bars to that one frame. Using a grafting tool (Chineese, german, or home made tool) to scoop up larva that are less than a day hatched from a worker bee cell and placed into the queen cups. That frame of grafted young larva is put into the cell builder you made up.

People shake nurse bees into start cell builders and you name it. Easy way is to put capped and emerging brood frames into the box and wait a week. No queen and an overwhelming number of nurse bees panicking to make a queen.

 

[Sally PB]

Thank you! That was very informative!

 

[R2elk]

44⁰F

There were many flying around.

 

[Sally PB]

There were many flying around.

Love these pictures! Spring is coming, eventually!

 

[R2elk]

Love these pictures! Spring is coming, eventually!

Not very soon here. This is our normal January thaw that causes trees, etc. to die.