So what about the middle aged beekeeper who has one or two hives. He/she is wearing bifocals, doesn't really want to try grafting microscopic larvae but has a colony with seven frames of brood and five frames of honey. Certainly a candidate to split. (I think I just described myself, except now I wear bifocal contact lenses which are awesome). A simple split is to just put two frames of brood and a frame of food in a nuc with some frames of foundation or comb. Just hope they can queen themselves. This is done every day somewhere with success. But for the do-it yourselfer, I want to make my own queen, or get my bees to make one for me.
I watched the Fat Beeman do a video where he cut comb with eggs and larvae and squashed it to a frame. Really pretty simple, I don't need to handle larvae and the age isn't really a factor. The bees will choose the one they want. This is just my speed to make a couple of queens.
So what do we need to do this? First a strong colony, I run all medium boxes so I'm looking for at least three boxes full of bees. Could probably do the same thing with a deep and medium. I want to mate the queens before doing the split so I'll need some sort of mating nuc(s). I could make some or make a divider board and reduce a five frame nuc down to 2 frames. Could get bold and modify a 5 frame nuc with a small entrance on each side and split the middle, make a double mating box, sort of what people call a queen castle. Keeping things as simple as possible I'd just need two nuc boxes. Being in Florida, pretty much everything I have has a screen bottom. The cell starter needs ventilation, either a screened bottom or screened sides. Since I plan to do this a lot I made a deep nuc with 2 inch holes in the lower sides and covered the inside with hardware cloth.
Getting started means I need a queenless box of bees. I don't want to spend hours looking for the queen so here's my solution. One to three days before I want to do my "grafts" I'll shake all of the bees down into the lower box(s), put on a queen excluder and put at least two frames of brood and 2 frames of food in the top box. On grafting day I'll take a frame of food with all of the bees on it and put it in my special starter nuc, then shake all of the bees off the brood frames. Might shake a couple more frames just to be sure I have enough bees. Seal them up in the box with 1 frame of food, at least 1 frame of comb or foundation and a wet sponge in a container of water. Now wait three or four hours. Four hours later, if I have another colony I'll go there for "grafts", if not I'm going straight to the bottom box. Looking for a frame of drawn comb with eggs and larvae. I'll cut strips about three cells wide and 20 long that have the youngest brood I can find. Maybe two or three strips. Lay them on a frame top bar so the cells will be vertical and smash the ends into the bar groove. It might distort the cells a bit but the bees will fix them if they want. Put this bar in the cell starter and leave them closed up over night. The next day, 24-30 hours later, I open the box and check for any acceptance. Then put the frame and all of the bees back in the first box above the excluder to be finished.
Tried this just this past Sunday. Check out the results.
So next Wednesday I'll put together some mating nucs and put cells in them. There's a video in the works when this is all done. Just wanted to get this part out there. Obviously there's no way to use everything they're making. I figure I could probably make some cuts and get cells to put in up to five boxes. I only need two so maybe I'll call around and see if anyone wants a cell. Stay tuned.
