In order to encourage a strong hive to make a number of queen cells, I'd like to remove the queen and a couple of frames from the hive. I'll place the queen and frames in a queen castle until I harvest the queen cells and place them in mating nucs.
Once all the queen cells have been harvested and placed in mating nucs, can I simply return the (uncaged) queen back to her original hive? Or do I need to cage her and let her colony reacquaint themselves with her once again?
-Liz
From what I've learned you don't want to pass 72 hours and return uncaged normally. By the time you have queen cells I think you'll have to return her caged to avoid trouble. Since they are queenless at this stage they should accept her pretty quickly.
There really is no need to remove her at all. you can wait until she lays new eggs, notch say 2 places on each side of 2 frames, stick it into a builder box, with workers honey and pollen frames on the outside and a few frames of nurse bees and they will make queen cells for you. And you just let the original queen and original hive continue on its merry way.
Do a search for OTS queen rearing. or On The Spot Queen rearing. you can then if you so choose, remove the queen cells from the builder hive, insert them one by one into frames and make a separate split for each one, or use each frame separately and let them figure out who survives for each colony, making splits, and then do it all over and over again. of course you are depleting your initial hive of offspring, but then you also potentially have many queens laying at a time which is far more efficient, and you can then do combines later on back into the original hive before the late flow, if you have one. 2-3hives of 30,000 bees has been shown in some studies to not produce as much as one hive of 60-90,000 bees, plus a larger hives over winters better...but then of course you have one queen too usually. (you can actually have more but not getting into that.) and 3+ hives tend to combine actually better then doing a 2 hive combination actually.
Thanks for your suggestions.
I'm experimenting with removing the queen from a strong, surviving hive because I just experienced one of my builder boxes failing. They made zero queen cells. I think I had too few bees in my builder box, and they couldn't generate enough enthusiasm to create new queens from the frame of eggs and larvae I gave them. So, I thought I might experiment with removing the queen and a couple of frames from the strong hive, place them in a nuc, and after I've harvested the queen cells from the strong hive, simply return the queen to her original hive and let her carry on.
If I do this, I guess I'll need to cage her first.
-Liz
When bees have queen cells in their hive they are expecting to have a queen very soon. So if you take cells out and put a queen in why would the bees reject her? Especially if you return her with a frame of brood. If you are really worried about it mix some honey and water in a spray bottle and spritz the bees on the adjoining frames and her frame, the bees will be too busy cleaning each other to notice.
i have make the colony quenless by removing the queen .and want to graft some cells. wiil the colony accpt the cells and make new queens?
Try Brother Adam's advice:
http://www.pedigreeapis.org/biblio/artcl/FAintroBW51en.html
Why wait until the queen cells are capped? I am going to put original queen back in as soon as they start the cells and either separate them with an excluder or put them in a different queen right hive to finish them.
So why not put her in the box without eggs and put an excluder and piece of masonite or similar between the boxes. In 24 to 48 hours, once the cells are started, remove the masonite and leave the excluder.