48 Hour Old Queen Cell Experiment

all right we're at our uh i call this our cell building yard i think you can probably tell which colonies are the cell builders they were just set up yesterday we have seven cell builders set up today and we're going to graft into them every week we change uh the cell builders we're using they go on a cycle of about three weeks so next week's we'll use another seven and give these a rest and so on and so forth anyway these were set up yesterday we're going to graft into them today and we're going to do a grand experiment that i agreed i would do uh back in january when i was at the hive life conference there in tennessee um kent williams was talking about uh putting two day old queen cells into nukes and he said it works pretty good and the nukes finish him off and he was quite happy with the results i also remember uh i believe it was larry connor that wrote an article on doing the same thing many years ago i think he wrote the article in to be culture magazine and at that time i kind of just pooh-poohed it and thought it sounded like a bad idea but after listening to kent talk about it i thought i'd give it a shot um we're going to graft 45 cells into each cell builder and we're going to have some nukes that will have been queenless overnight that we're going to put the two-day sales into on thursday today is tuesday our grafting schedule is usually we we graft on tuesdays and that would normally give us ripe sales to put into nukes the next week on a friday but again this week we're just going to wait two days and we're going to take them out probably put the rails with the queen cells and all bees and all right into a nuke box and carry them in a nuke box and we'll take them right out to the nukes that have been queenless overnight and we're just gonna see what happens i'm very curious about this because if these nukes do a real good job of building these cells this could be a total game changer for us we wouldn't have to wait a week and a half to get our cells into a call into a queenless colony it'd be very interesting i'm looking forward to seeing the results on this grafting today two days we'll come back and get the cells put them out and we'll check them periodically to see how they look and then all of these nukes that these cells are going into are actually going to become overwintering colonies for me overwintering nukes or single stories so i'll be able to watch this process all the way up into next year it makes sense the more i think about it so i don't see why these queenless nukes won't take a a two day old cell and finish it off they'd be wanting to build their own cells anyway so why wouldn't they okay i'm not going to get into too much detail about how we do this i've got a video out on how we build queen cells and make queens and i'll put a link to that at the end of this video i'll just briefly show you how we set up these cell builders and put the cells in this was a queen right double deep colony and we put the queen up on the top over a double screen board and took about half the bees off the frames that she's with into the bottom box kind of reversed the bottom that was the upper box to the bottom and as you can see there's a bunch of bees in there this overcrowded condition is really important for good cell building in my opinion you get the very best cells when you have an overcrowded condition so the queen's in that box and we have a double screen board with the entrance to the back so all the field force is coming back to the bottom the queenless part as you can see this thing is just jammed full of bees and that's what you want when you're going to make good cells we always put the frame of grafted cells two frames over from the feeder when we made this queenless yesterday we just gave them a frame of open brood here so they have something to feed and work on and until today when we give them the grafted cells and it's just exactly what we'd expect they've already started some little queen cells so you need to get rid of all that business and i'll go get the next brick and this uh frame will go in with the queen okay so here's our graph that sells 45 to a frame i'm going to top this feeder off we filled it yesterday but i would expect about half of it to be gone today and i think it's important to be feeding thin sucrose syrup when they're building cells i always get better results when i'm feeding the bees at the same time that we're building cells each of these seven colonies we're working with today have 45 cells grafted into them i want to get a little bit of an idea of what our success rate is and that one's a dud looks pretty good so i'm just going to put the frame bees and all right on the cells in this nuke that we're going to transport these cells in we need about five of these frames today for the nukes we're working with um that was a good i'm just going to surround these by another two frames with bees and honey that's how we're going to transport them there's 175 cells in there and we're just going to transport them in this new box got the entrance screen we're at our we call it the walmart yard in clayton we're right across the street from home depot in walmart in clayton georgia let's just take one bar out of the time and do this and you just put that frame back in there until we're finished with this part we're just going to put the cells right on the perimeter of the existing brood um they've got a lot of royal jelly in them already i know that the first 40 hours 48 hours is when the majority of the royal jelly is fed to these queen cells it'll be very interesting to see how the royal jelly quantity looks later when we check them next week [Music] now we're going to try some of these by just putting the cell in between the top bars i'm not sure how that's going to work i think we'll kind of leave it a little loose [Music] we'll do several like that and see how that turns up anytime we make cells we always feed thin sucrose syrup unless there's a nectar flow it seems like the prudent thing to do in this case too seth is putting two two penny nail holes in the top of each lid we're using five pound honey jars to feed these nukes [Music] that side we had harvested the queens the day before we put the cells in this side we harvested the queen and immediately put the cells in and we're back today just to look at the cells see what they did with it how good they did it cell building and also the ones that had been queenless for a day i want to see uh i want to compare the cells that they built from scratch which i'm sure they had started some to the ones that we put in so jesse's about to open the first one let's go over here so most of the nukes in this yard are like this they're a frame and a half of brood uh i'd probably call that three frames of bees maybe three and a half frames of bees it's just the foundation there [Music] frame of food this yard is just set up as queen mating nukes okay so that's the cell we put in um still got a lot of royal jelly up there i don't see a royal jelly problem at all okay let's did they build any of their own cells they should have that's that's something they built right there yep there's a couple more there okay and things can hide real good okay about half full of royal jelly okay so this nuke is smaller some of these are smaller in this yard i want to compare the small ones and see what they did with the cells i don't think this is ideal putting that cell in such a small colony but the cell isn't that interesting they put another cell of their own right next to it so we want to get rid of those that didn't look too bad no it's still got a lot of royal jelly a lot of royal jelly yeah [Music] okay a little on the small side that's a real small nuke though too yeah okay okay here's the cell we put in got a little skinned up coming out but it's still full of royal jelly so they built a decent cell go ahead and kill all the rogue cells the cells that they started okay john found this cell a beginning beekeeper might think this is a real nice cell because it's so long but what this is telling me is that the queen larva fell off the royal jelly and the cell just became elongated this is not a good cell i'm going to open it up just for the fun of it and see she's falling off she's down in the bottom there this should never be a good situation so i think i can see a little bit about what's going on here the the best cells in this yard are built by the colonies that are at least two frames of brood uh three to four frames of bees these real small ones that are just one frame of brood and two or three frames of bees have built cells out okay but they don't look as as nice and robust as the ones that were built by the nukes that had at least two frames of brood jesse's about to get to the ones that where we put the queen cell in between the top bars i want to see how that turned out too well they definitely built it out i can see that a little worried about tearing the cell as we take it apart but i do want to see what's going on in here you can see royal jelly in there still it's not a bad looking cell i've ripped it a little though taking it apart no i didn't faked me out okay nothing wrong with that i'll check a couple others that's a little bigger nuke see so i think that's why they did a little better job [Music] [Music] put the small clean cell in a nuke where we had just harvested between like literally 20 minutes later there it is they did yep okay looks okay it's full alone look at all that i think if i was going to make a practice of introducing these young cells to anything i would do it immediately after collecting the queen all of these have built cells and they're fairly decent the bigger ones built actually built pretty good cells i don't think i would take the queen out and put the cell in the next day because you have to go back through all the nukes or colonies whatever you're using and do away with the cells that they built themselves now in on this side where we put the cell in immediately after harvesting the queen they have built some cells but they're all younger than ours so ours will be the first cell that hatches so if you are going to do this i think it's okay to put the cell in right after harvesting the queen or making your split we set up a couple of yards with those 48 hour old queen cells this is another one in northeast georgia the timing is such that they should be just starting to lay right now so we're going to check on the shape of some of these queens this is around random i have not checked this new kit and she's in here we should just be starting to see eggs and there's a few eggs on this frame there she is this is the queen that was raised from one of those 48 hour old and we've looked at several jesse and i have already looked at about 20. they all look really good i see no problem with the at least the physical appearance of these queens so my take so far on this situation is that the larger nukes that have two frames of brood or more that are fairly robust nukes are doing a pretty good job of making cells the ones that are smaller one frame of brood one and a half frame of brood they're building cells and i mean they look okay but they're not as good as the ones that have more brood more bees in them basically i still haven't really figured out if there's some real advantage to this over just letting the cell builders finish the cells and put a ripe sale in at least for queen mating nukes i think that's probably the way to go if you're making larger units larger splits that have several frames of brood and and bees you know these cells might be the way to go but for queen mating nukes i don't think so i don't think they're building good enough cells not for me anyway

Channel: Bob Binnie

Views: 18,949

Rating: 4.9330287 out of 5

Keywords: bob binnie bees, bob binnie queen rearing, bob binnie at blue ridge honey company, bob binnie youtube, bob binnie nuc, queen cell, mating nuc, queen rearing, mating nucleus, queen cells honey bees, producing queen bees, queen cells

Id: oETwqBzeD5s

Length: 19min 8sec (1148 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 18 2021