Tried the IMN On The Spot Queen Rearing method, where you break away the lower part of a cell wall with a 36-hour larvae in it, and the bees develop it into a queen cell. It worked, or so I thought. I had 7 queen cells started with larvae and royal jelly in each. Came back three days later, and the bees had torn them all down and repaired the comb. Not a single sign of them! Instead, I found about 20 swarm cells scattered about the brood nest along the bottoms and sides of about 6 frames. So I have queen cells, and provided none of them are older than I think and emerged last night and killed all the others, I will be moving them into 2-frame mating nucs in a couple of hours.
Having never done any queen rearing before, I have some questions.
- How important is the age of the larvae in this method? I broke the cell bottoms on a number of cells in two other hives, always selecting the youngest possible larvae I could find, and the bees did not start any queen cells from those. Do the larvae need to be about 36 hours old? Is younger bad?
- Any ideas on why the 7 queen cells were aborted and torn down? Should I have moved the frame with those queen cups/cells into a queenless starter hive rather than leave them in a queenright hive?
- Would the hive getting into swarm mode have caused them to tear them down in favor of other new swarm cells?
Now to the swarm cells. I found the queen (she is marked) and moved her into a new split. Will that "cure" the swarming drive, at least in the split? I will be removing all but one of the swarm cells plus a number of bees from the parent hive - will that "cure" that hive's swarming drive?
Thanks,
Grid.
I found this with a search.
""Q: Why is it so important to use a Cell Builder for the on-the-spot method of queen rearing?
A: A Cell Builder is a strong but queen-less 6-7 brood-frame hive left on the original location after the original queen, 2 frames of brood, and a couple of shakes of nurse bees have been removed.""
You say you found the queen. That is why they tore the cells down. The hive needs to be queenless for them to build cells, except for swarm cells.
PS. I had never heard of the imn method, so did a search.
I read all of the material on it a couple of years ago. It sounds really interesting but I haven't grown the cajones to put it into a trial on my girls yet.
I read all the material on it a couple of years ago. It sound very interesting as well as labor intensive but I haven't had the cajones to put it into trial on my girls.
sorry about the double post, it's storming here and the internets are spotty!
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When you have those 20 queen cells no in the hive, change good larvae into them.
Then make mating nucs from those frames and let the queens emerge in nucs.
This gives splended results.
Thanks all. First time attempting queen rearing, so looks like I made a newbee mistake. I was hoping to be able to do this without having to find that queen. Worse than a needle in a haystack, but oh well - it is what it is, and guess it has to be done to get this working. I have a queenless hive now, as I finally found the queen and moved her into a split of her own, and took the swarm cells and made 5 mating nucs out of them, leaving a couple of swarm cells behind. I put a frame of eggs in there, so the next three days I should have some candidates for this method, this time in a queenless hive. I'll keep you all posted.
Grid.
Not sure of the IMN On The Spot Queen Rearing method but with the Nicot method if the cells are caped by day 4, the procedure is to destroy the larvae as the queens will not have received enough royal jelly to produce a strong queen.