queen rearing failed

[teebo]

My first attempt at raising queens failed, I did what I had read using a graftless queen rearing system,placed the queen in the cell grid, she layed eggs in the brown cell cups waited 3 days then placed the brown cell cups yellow cell cup holders attaching them to the top bar when back 2 days later and larva in cups were gone, but the queenless hive had drawn out 3 or 4 queen cells from brood frames. My question is, will these queen be any good if i make wire cages to capture them in before they hatch.  

[kathyp]

how will you get them mated?  i had thought about doing as you are doing, but wanted to learn more.  i was just going to take the queen cells and make splits.....which might have worked better than what i did. 

[teebo]

i would leave 1 and try and make some nucs with the others if someone could tell me if they would be as good as queens reared the right way

[TwT]

you can do splits and make good queens but the differences is that if you dont have a flow going you have to feed, something else to make good queens is to not overload your hive like puting 45 grafts in a small hive that cant handle that many cells, some time people try to put to many cells in a hive and their quens dont turn out to be big , good queens. well even on splits if you dont have a flow feed 1-1 syrup and if they make it back from their mating flight they should be fine...

[Michael Bush]

>My first attempt at raising queens failed, I did what I had read using a graftless queen rearing system,placed the queen in the cell grid, she layed eggs in the brown cell cups waited 3 days

Acutally you nee to wait four days.  At 3 days they will still be eggs and the bees will simply remove them.

> then placed the brown cell cups yellow cell cup holders attaching them to the top bar when back 2 days later and larva in cups were gone

The other necessity is a box overflowing with queenless bees.  If the bees aren't packed in they won't start many cells.

> but the queenless hive had drawn out 3 or 4 queen cells from brood frames. My question is, will these queen be any good

Maybe.

> if i make wire cages to capture them in before they hatch.

I'm not sure how that would work, but good luck with it.  I've always just settled for one queen off of each frame that had some queen cells on it.

[CWBees]

I recently failed at my first attempt. Friday I placed the Nicot cage in the hive for the cell cups to be cleaned. Sat afternoon I placed the queen in the Nicot cage. Sunday I removed her and saw that she had layed numerous eggs. At this point is where I think I messed up. I took half of the hive with queen and split it from the half of the hive that had the Nicot cage and eggs. Tuesday I checked the cell in the queen cage and there were only eggs. Today late in the afternoon I pulled the cage and some cups still had eggs and some had what looked like Royal Jelley with a newly hatched larva. The larva looked close to being an egg not what you see in the books. So I don't know if they were dead or slow to develop. I placed the cups with what I assume to be larva and royal jelly onto the queen cell frame and placed the frame back into the queenless hive. I will see tomorrow how the cells take. I placed the Nicot queen cage back in the hive with the queen to have the cell cups cleaned since I think this batch of queens is a dud. My mistake is I should have followed the directions for the Nicot system and left the eggs in a queenright hive until the larva hatched and then were 18hrs old. Having the eggs in a hive without a queen must have caused some problems.

Yesterday I placed another batch of larva between 18 and 36hrs old in the cell builder. The eggs came from a strong hive however I almost did not have enough larva since the bees were filling some of the cell cups with nectar. I will check the larva tomorrow and hopefully I will find the bees making queen cells.

[Michael Bush]

Your timing is correct.  Confine on Saturday, release on Sunday, setup cell starter by making queenless on Tuesday, transfer larvae on Wednesday.  The cell starter needs to be crowded to overflowing with bees.