First attempt was disappointing!

[joebrown]

Well my first attempt at queen rearing was disappointing. I had lots of issues though. I used the Nicot System.. First, It took the queen two days to finally lay eggs in the cell cups. Second, the cardboard Nucs sold at Brushy Mountain do not have enough ventilation to become cell builders. Within 12 hours frames of honey were melting and the comb was falling out of the frames. Needless to say, there went half of those bees. The other Nuc produced so much condensation that the bees were nearly drowning. I changed plans halfway through and decided to go the Cloake Board route. I just dumped my cell builder Nucs in a hive body above my Cloake board. I transferred the cell cups to the cell bar with no problems. However, the larva was really small and only had a small amount of Royal Jelly in the cups. I fed them throughout the first few days as well. I was hoping for 75% to 80% rear rate. I placed 40 cups in the hive. Instead I got more like 10% to 15% with only 4 of the 40 cell cups producing queens. The few other queen cells are on frames. Pretty disappointing. So next time I will not be using the cell builder method and will go strictly with the Cloake board method. I may also give the larva some extra time to grow as well. I transferred at 3.5 days. Next time I will wait for 4 days and make sure they have enough Royal Jelly. Other than that I do not know what else to do!

[Kathyp]

pm hardwood or allen (don't remember his board name).  both do a lot of queen rearing and will be able to give you some pointers.  there are others who i'm sure will chime in with some suggestions.

[buzzbee]

kathy,
If you are referring to Alan his website is here:
http://www.mountainvalleybees.com/warp.php?core=Contact

His profile to send a PM:
http://forum.beemaster.com/index.php?action=profile;u=4182;sa=summary

[Kathyp]

alan.  yes.  one L and and A   :-D

[Michael Bush]

A swarm box should have a large screened area either a complete screened bottom and something to hold it off the ground or a screened area around the bottom few inches of the box:

Jay Smith:
QRS:
http://bushfarms.com/Beehives/QRSSwarmBox.JPG
Better Queens:
http://bushfarms.com/images/BQPg46.jpg
http://bushfarms.com/beesbetterqueens.htm#The%20Starter%20Hive
Alley:
http://bushfarms.com/beesalleymethod.htm#swarming_box

I believe all of these have screened bottoms and several have screened tops.  You also need extra room at the bottom and a sponge soaked in water for a water source or as Smith did it, spray a lot of water onto some combs of nectar and give them that.  They will consume a lot of water.

As far as acceptance the first couple of times you have the plastic issue.  Once it's been in the hive a while (which you could do without trying to rear queens) it will get propolized and smell ok to them.