Cut Down Queen Cells

[Ben Framed]

A while back I fixed up a cell starter and was off to the races so it seemed. After the first day, I had a very high percentage of new queen cells started on the bars. A few days later, I found them all cut down or mostly all cut down, I also found a new queen, a queen cell that I had over looked when building the cell starter had hatched.  A rookie mistake but a big mistake to me and a real setback. Here I go, I again have a question. If I had placed the frame with the bars on it, in a special made cage encased with queen excluders, would these cells possibly survived since the new queen could not reach them?  Or, would the worker, and or nurse bees, taken them down anyway? Thanks
Phillip

[van from Arkansas]

Ben, if a queen is excluded and her pheromones do not reach the queen cell, then the workers will tend to the queen cells.

In other words it is called queen rite finisher hive.  With my queen rite finisher hive the queen is in bottom deep with excluder on bottom deep, then I place 2 more deeps on top of the excluder with my queen cells in the top deep.  There needs to be space between the excluded queen and the queen cells.  Total 3 deeps in all, queen in the bottom, queen cells in the top.  This works very well for me.  Queen cells are caged and upon hatching the queens are now called BANKED QUEENS.  These banked queens can be kept for weeks like this but quality dwindles with time.  7 days is prime for mating flights and best to put these 7 day old queens in some sort of mating hive such as a nuc 2-5 frame.

[Michael Bush]

For a finisher, I put the queen under an excluder in the bottom box and the cells above with at least one box between the two.  I also put some open brood on each side of the queen cells.  That attracts nurse bees and the queen is far enough away so that her pheromones don?t incite them to tear down the queen cells.

[TheHoneyPump]

Sorry to see of your setback.  It usually happens to each of us ... at least once!

It is good practice to thoroughly inspect the cell builder each time before placing a new set of grafts in.  Get good at it and it does not take long.

On the queen excluder thingamajig around a graft frame:  No.  Just no.  Just setup the hive properly as already described.

On queen excluders in cell builder/finishers in general.  The QE works well and perfectly to keep a mature queen out.  HOWEVER, newly emerged virgins can get through - sometimes, pretty rare but it has happened to me a couple times.  I do not know for sure how she manages it.  I can hypothesize:  Although her thorax is also large, she may be able to squeeze through in her first day because her outer shell is soft and flexible until she hardens over the next 3 days.  Other possibility is, despite our efforts not all queens come out perfectly proportioned and huge like we want.  There are runts.  And those runts can go through QE's.  Hence any newly emerged rogue virgin is danger not just for the other cells on the bars nearby, but potentially also the queen rite colony below the QE.

Thoroughness of inspection and disciplined timing is everything in queen rearing.  On the timing, I have a tip for you.  Do not gauge the emergence by your graft day.  Inspect the graft daily between d7 and d10.  On the day you see the cells are being capped, that is day 9 (NINE).  Reset your calendar to align with day 9, the queens are coming out 6 days later and they had better be put into nucs at 5 days post capping.   

The queen waits for no one.  Bee disciplined.  Bee thorough.  Bee punctual.


PS:  the queenless cell starter followed by the queerite finisher as described is a great method.  It is what I use also.  The question I have for Van; if he allows the virgins to emerge into cages how are those then introduced into a nuc?   I have found that the bees much prefer a mated queen or a ripe cell and she comes out that way.  Virgins are tricky business - at least for me they are.

[Ben Framed]

I want to thank each of you for your response and input. Very valuable information from each of you. I can not describe my gratitude in an adequate way, as to how much I appreciate each of you. What a privilege to be a member of a forum such as this, and honored to talk to, and receive advise from such heavy-hitters as yourselves.  I am humbled. Thank you each, very much.
Phillip

[van from Arkansas]

HP:

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The large queen cage allows pheromones to be distributed over a large area increasing acceptance to 90 plus percent.  Of course this is in a 2 frame castle or 5 frame nuc with brood next to queen cage.  There will be no young larva nor eggs present.  I manually release the queen by opening the swinging lid, only after the bees show acceptance.

If I shake bees into a tupperware crate and encourage the bees to fly off, then I am left with almost 100 percent nurse bees with guaranteed acceptance, well, almost guaranteed.  This is my process for introducing a precious instrumental inseminated queen, to all nurse bees.  Almost fool proof.

My preference is to place a queen cell in a queenless nuc.  However this luxury is not often as I hatch 15 queens per graft and my apiary limit is 20 hives.  So I use queen castles mostly: 10 frame langstrof that has 4 sealed compartments each compartment with 2 frames.  There are always club members looking for a queen which I give away.

Most of my queen loss is due to virgin mating flights with an array of: cat birds, tanagers, robber flies, dragon flies and lately severe weather; sunny to stormy is the course of 30 minutes.
Best of good things.
Van

[TheHoneyPump]

Thanks Van.  An interesting device for sure. I can understand it working exceptionally well for a mated queen.  Virgins ... perhaps do not have much of any pheromone?

The neat trick you just taught me is the shake to have just nurse bees to stock the nuc.  That alone should increase the virgin queen acceptance substantially. Thanks for that.

My mating nucs are stand alone 2 frame deeps boxes.

[TheHoneyPump]

As a followup on this.  Today I have had a PERFECT example scenario of why it is so important to check.

Today was a graft day for me for topping off my stock numbers from two of my favourite queens. Those queens are in an outyard 10 miles away from my cell starter hive and the cell finisher hives. 

My overall process for this is:  goto the cell starter hive and pull 3 frames plus shakes of bees and put those into a 5 frame nuc box. (3 frames plus a bunch of extra bees in the 5 box).  Then take that box for a ride out to the beeyard.  Go into the mother queen(s) hive and find one choicest frame to graft off of.  Put that frame in the nuc box.  Do that twice, taking one frame from each mother queen hive.  Return home with a full nuc box.  Pretty simple, hope you follow this far. 

Next is to graft one frame of bars from each of the two frames in the nuc box that were taken from the queens 10 miles away.  Those graft frames will go into the cell starter hive along with returning of the bees and frames taken earlier in the day.  After the larvae are grafted, the two brood frames grafted from are given as boost to a small queenrite hive nearby the cell builders. Frames of eggs and larvae do NOT go into the cell starter.  They stay hopelessly queenless (no brood) until all the queen rearing is finished for the year.  It gets only shook bees and occasionally capped mature emerging brood. 

Here is where the today story gets interesting. All goes fine according to plan, up to when I am about to put the grafts into the cell starter.  I open the cell starter and flip through the bees and frames in it to verify no other queen cells or VQ are present.  All good in there. I put the graft frames in.  I open the nuc box to return the frames and bees to the starter.  First frame I take out of the nuc box, I examine it and see a nice black virgin queen running around on it.  STOP, change of plan.  I cage her and put her in my pocket.  Next of course is thorough inspection of the nuc box to ensure there are no more.  None found.

All bees except for two frames are shook back into the cell starter.   The two frames are put into one of my 2F mating boxes.  VQ taken out of my pocket and released into the mating nuc.  Tomorrow I will set her out in the mating yard. 

Morale of the story.  ALWAYS double check thoroughly when doing anything wrt queens. Results: 1)   Catastrophe avoided. Overnight she would have eaten every one of the grafts made today.  2) Extra FREE queen in a box and ready to go out to the mating yard.


Hope you enjoyed the share. 
Todays experience ... Tomorrows success.

[Ben Framed]

As a followup on this.  Today I have had a PERFECT example scenario of why it is so important to check.

Today was a graft day for me for topping off my stock numbers from two of my favourite queens. Those queens are in an outyard 10 miles away from my cell starter hive and the cell finisher hives. 

My overall process for this is:  goto the cell starter hive and pull 3 frames plus shakes of bees and put those into a 5 frame nuc box. (3 frames plus a bunch of extra bees in the 5 box).  Then take that box for a ride out to the beeyard.  Go into the mother queen(s) hive and find one choicest frame to graft off of.  Put that frame in the nuc box.  Do that twice, taking one frame from each mother queen hive.  Return home with a full nuc box.  Pretty simple, hope you follow this far. 

Next is to graft one frame of bars from each of the two frames in the nuc box that were taken from the queens 10 miles away.  Those graft frames will go into the cell starter hive along with returning of the bees and frames taken earlier in the day.  After the larvae are grafted, the two brood frames grafted from are given as boost to a small queenrite hive nearby the cell builders. Frames of eggs and larvae do NOT go into the cell starter.  They stay hopelessly queenless (no brood) until all the queen rearing is finished for the year.  It gets only shook bees and occasionally capped mature emerging brood. 

Here is where the today story gets interesting. All goes fine according to plan, up to when I am about to put the grafts into the cell starter.  I open the cell starter and flip through the bees and frames in it to verify no other queen cells or VQ are present.  All good in there. I put the graft frames in.  I open the nuc box to return the frames and bees to the starter.  First frame I take out of the nuc box, I examine it and see a nice black virgin queen running around on it.  STOP, change of plan.  I cage her and put her in my pocket.  Next of course is thorough inspection of the nuc box to ensure there are no more.  None found.

All bees except for two frames are shook back into the cell starter.   The two frames are put into one of my 2F mating boxes.  VQ taken out of my pocket and released into the mating nuc.  Tomorrow I will set her out in the mating yard. 

Morale of the story.  ALWAYS double check thoroughly when doing anything wrt queens. Results: 1)   Catastrophe avoided. Overnight she would have eaten every one of the grafts made today.  2) Extra FREE queen in a box and ready to go out to the mating yard.


Hope you enjoyed the share. 
Todays experience ... Tomorrows success.

Yes Sir, I can say I thoroughly enjoyed your shared experience, your explanation was so vivid, it was almost like being there with you myself. Thanks for sharing your experience and for being so thoughtful to post, adding to my education. Sincerely,
Phillip

[Bob Wilson]

Honey Pump. I understood the part about almost overlooking that queen, and what that would have meant, but all the rest about grafting and why you put what frames into which box, went completely over my head. I don't understand why, after my considerable 4 months of beekeeping experience, I don't seem to have a complete mastery over all things bee related.

[TheHoneyPump]

Honey Pump. I understood the part about almost overlooking that queen, and what that would have meant, but all the rest about grafting and why you put what frames into which box, went completely over my head. I don't understand why, after my considerable 4 months of beekeeping experience, I don't seem to have a complete mastery over all things bee related.

OK sure, I will elaborate a bit.  The source of the larvae for the graft were 10 miles away from the cell builder yard where I do the grafting and the cell building. Normally, I have my breeder hives in the same yard as the builders.  In this case, I had put my old breeders "out to pasture" to retire a few weeks ago. I decided I wanted one more set from each of them. Hence the distance to go.

I had to go get brood frames to graft off of. The best incubator for larvae in transit are bees. So I stuffed a nuc box with bees and 3 frames.  This left space in the nuc for the two breeder brood frames I was going to bring back.  The bees used for populating the nuc for the transit were drawn from the cell builder hive.  Upon returning, the bees were returned to the cell builder hive.

After the graft, the two breeder brood frames were put into a completely separate queen rite hive in the builder yard.

Does that help?