Queen mating resources

As I've gotten a bit better with my grafting and the production of emerged virgin queens, I find myself in a dilemma. For every emerged queen I need a mating nuc, which means essentially 1 frame of brood, preferable a frame mostly capped with some food on it. The problem now, or what soon could be, is that as I'm grafting and getting more queens, I will eventually need 12 to 20 mating nucs. And I simply don't have enough brood frames to fill the nucs.  I'm asking the club if some members would donate a medium ( I use all mediums) frame of capped brood to put in boxes. Considering that I had 9 cells started in mom's yard, I should have some emerged queens Thursday and will need bees.
I will make some mating nucs this weekend and could use bees Wednesday evening. I figure 4 frames this week, and another 4 next week. Not going to do any grafts this week as they would emerge while I'm at bee college. I'll come to you and grab a frame.

Next season, if things work out, I'd like to have a yard where we could have two or three breeder colonies and 30-50 mating boxes. (since they would be doubles it would be 15-25 boxes). I'd also like to get one or two more people in the whole process. Something to remember when rearing queens is that once you start you are controlled by the calendar. You MUST either cage them or move them by day 12-14 because she can come out anytime after 14 days, especially if you grafted a day 6 instead of a day 4 larvae (been there done that). It's late in the year to try and start this now, but March will get here soon enough and the first week of March is prime time to start rearing queens. Once established, as a club resource we could feasibly raise 6-10 queens a week. Those which are not needed could be mated and banked for a time. Trying to figure out what to do with a bunch of mated queens is a problem I can live with, much better than scrambling to find one. 

If you can donate a frame, let me know by Tuesday. If you're interested in queen breeding, let's talk at the October meeting.

A timing belt and a tent

It's not about beekeeping, at least not directly, it is about life though. My wife's car is a 1999 Mercury, she travels all over the county for her job and as I don't know the maintenance history, decided it would be a good idea to change the timing belt.  Our schedules as they are, the only real time I had was Labor Day. Which for me turned out to be a day of labor. I'd removed a bee colony Sunday evening but couldn't get all of them, there are always some foragers out and about. So I promised the homeowner to return Monday morning to collect whatever clustered overnight. Did that, picked up a few more pounds of bees. Took them to the yard and added to the removal. Got home and started on the car, it was about 10:00.  Things were moving fairly smoothly until around 12:00 when the thunderstorm hit. I waited it out for a bit, looked a the radar and saw it was pretty bleak. Called a friend with a pop up tent, an EZ up. No problem, went and borrowed that. Back to the car now under a tent. The rest of the job went fairly well, I did have to go to the parts store for spark plugs, discovered that one of the originals had two pretty serious cracks in the porcelain. Felt pretty dumb too, her car has had an occasional miss for nearly a year, the computer diagnostic said it was the variable timing. There was a time, before car computers, when I would have pulled spark plugs first. A lesson learned, trust my instincts and not computers. The timing belt that came off had several small pieces missing from one edge and a pretty good flap, failure was eminent. A good decision to change it when I did. Thanks to my dad who taught me so much about cars so many years ago. And thanks to my friend with the pop up tent. I finished the job by 4:20 so Vicki could drive it to work at 6:00.