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.
