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Monday, 9 July 2018
Who ever thought I would be raising insects?
This year, I'm working on raising more hives using nucs (a small hive). I have been grafting sporadically for the last few years with wild variations on success. This year I made an effort and can reliably get 25+ out of 30 grafts. Its all in how you set up your cell rearing box. It has to be overflowing with bees and have lots of food. I know this and was taught this by other beekeepers, but for one reason or another didn't always do it. One year a virgin queen found my box and the bees destroyed all my frames of cells. They have a queen, why raise another? Figured it out when she mated and started to lay.
I have been using the extra queen cells to replace older or just plain crappy queens and hives that have gone queen less for some reason. Its July and I have found a couple of queen less ones. Luckily I have a queen for them! Course I wonder how many I have not found...
Made up just over 40 nucs this year (some in the picture) and will see if I can winter them. Next year I will work on getting more so that I can try to reduce my dependence on foreign queens. This is my test year to work out the details. I would like to start earlier and only my few early ones have a mated queen. All the rain is slowing down the mating. But, I can't resist and have poked at them to see that the queen was released (all but one) and found a virgin running around in one. That's positive! I need to wait for next week to be sure what is going on. Queens can be mated anywhere from 10 days if all is super ideal to 20+ days. With the rain, I am certainly not on the 10 day schedule.
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