Cutting Queen Cells from top Bar Hive to Place in a Langstroth Nuc

[SawBee]

 I wanted to start some Langstroth hives from some existing top bar hives.  April 30, I moved the queen, honey frames and some capped brood from a Top Bar Hive to a new Top Bar Hive.  May 8th, the original queenless hive had 6  capped Queen cells.  I carefully cut one Queen cell and stuck it to some drawn comb and used rubber bands to fasten the comb into a foundationless medium Langstroth frame.  I took a couple of pounds of last seasons capped honey and attached it to  a foundationless medium Langstroth frames with rubber bands.  Then I brushed all the bees off three top bar hive frames into a 4 frame medium nuc box.  i still see bees coming and going around the nuc today May 9th.  This is the first time I've tried cutting out queen cells, so I'm not sure if did things correctly.   It should be an interesting experiment and it will be great if I get a Langstroth hive started.

[tillie]

A couple of years ago at Young Harris, I saw a guy take an instrument that looked like a small biscuit cutter and cut the queen cell out with surrounding comb.  Then he went to the frame onto which he wanted to put the queen cell and used the same instrument to cut out an identical circle of wax out of that comb.  Then he placed the cut queen cell into its new home and all was well and happy.

Linda T in Atlanta

[annette]

I like that. Was this some special cutter, or any cutter would work??

[SawBee]

The Queen Cells on the Top Bar hive were on the edge so they were easy to cut with a knife.  I like the cutter idea, but the hardest part would be some way to support the other side of the comb to have something to press the Cutter against without smashing bees.  Maybe two identical cutters placed directly opposite of each other and each cutting from their respective sides would solve that problem.

[Tommyt]

FATBEEMAN
Does this in a youtube video he calls them Plugs ,he cuts all his out puts them in a container
then when he opens the queen-less hives, he makes a cut to resemble the Plug then pushes it in
He uses a knife that looks like, or is a Fillet knife.
Now remember this is off memory best to find the video :-D

Tommyt