Grafting Success!

I had a somewhat exciting week, this past week, Spring Break.  I grafted for the first, second, and third times. 

Sunday night, I made up some cell bars using wax cell cups I purchased from Rossman.  Monday morning, I put them in the hive so the bees could get used to them.  I put 12 cups on at first.

On Tuesday, there seemed like there was going to be a break in the rain after it had rained for two days. During an actual break in the rain, I ran out to my chosen hive and did the manipulations for the Ben Harden Method, acquired the frame to be grafted from, grafted, and placed the cell bar frame back in the hive.  I added six more cups just for fun. 

The Ben Harden method is one in which you use a queenright colony to raise new queens.  To do this, you make two dummies, frames that are just solid wood which kind of concentration the action in the hive to just a few frames in the middle.  You put this setup above a queen excluder.  You then place a frame of pollen, a frame of young brood, and the cell bar frame in the box and nurse bees are supposed to come up from below and care for the new queens.  They are not supposed to reject them because the queen has never set foot on that cell bar frame and thus her scent is not there.  It's managed kind of like an engineered supersedure.

Later in the week, I checked.  Every single one had failed.  No takers.  I had a few ideas why, the rain was on the top of the list.  I should have had more patience.  Instead of nurse bees coming up to tend the brood, they stayed in the main brood nest as it was probably too cold to go meandering about the hive.  Fortunately though, I had placed an empty comb in the broodnest to replace the one I put in the upper box.  But I'll get back to that later.

So I left the cell bar frame in the hive and waited until Saturday when the weather should be excellent.  I made up some more cell bars, another frame with 18 and decided that I would retry the Harden Method and also do a batch with a regular queenless hive.  That frame that I had put in on Tuesday was now the perfect frame to graft from and to use to bait nurses up from below.  All the larvae were pretty uniformly on their first day out of the egg (some eggs remaining) and were the perfect age to be grafted.  Add to that the fact that the cups had been in the hive for half a week and were well polished and ready to go.

It's hard to tell in this picture, but the bees have begun to raise 17 out of the 18 grafted larvae.  Quite a good run.  Remember, this is in a queenright hive which can go about its business with no disruption in brood rearing or queenlessness.

I took pictures of the queenless hive cell bar this morning as well, but my phone focused on the grass in the background rather than the bees so the picture is out of focus.  But it looks almost the same except that they only took 12 of the 18 grafted.  I reason this is at least partly because the cells were not allowed to be polished by the bees before grafting.  You can be assured I will not make that mistake again.

Overall, this was a very successful excercise and one from which I learned greatly.  More updates soon.  In a week, it will be time to make up mating nucs and that is likely to be a monumental task.

As you can see in the picture at the top, the yard looks markedly different.  I've removed most of the real estate from the hives that are not doing what they should be doing at this time of the year.  The middle hive in the left row is the one wherein the Harden Method is being used, and the very back corner one is the queenless one.  Its queen is in the nuc behind the bricks to the left of it.  All the honey stored from last year in the puner hives is being stored on the big nasty hive in the front.  This year, it is the designated honey producer.  It is a very active and healthy hive, but a little too mean to breed from.  Such a shame.

29 mating nucs is going to be a marathon!

Wastefulness of the Natural Way of Queen Production

Here's the most recent photo of the yard.

I've been splitting like mad lately.  At last note, there were 12, now there are 17.  I recieved my four new queens with which I made four new hives.  There have been several near disasters with them, primarily owing to severe robbing problems.  One hive was being robbed in terrific fashion, so bad that I took the four frames of brood and queen and put them in a nuc box with a frame of capped honey and took them away.  The robbers then took after the next hive in the row which seemed to be holding its own.  I removed its feeder and the problem seemed to abate.  A third one, I opened to see if the queen had been released, and sure enough she had, just in time to fly away.  It was about five minutes before I found her balled at the entrance of a nearby hive.  It is yet to be seen if she will survive but I hope so.  If she was injured, she'll be replaced, hopefully at the very least with one of her daughters and not one of the daughters of the donor hives with which this hive was made.

Lessons learned:  Don't feed queenless hives.  Keep entrances very small on new splits.  Don't muck about with newly released queens. 

Now, about the title. 

In emergency situations, such as a lost queen or a walkaway split, the hive will feed appropriate aged larvae royal jelly and make a dozen or so into queens.  As Michael Bush rightly states, for all this expenditure of energy and nearly a month of no new eggs, the only result is a single queen as the rest get killed off.  While this is beneficial in a way to the bees in the sense of natural selection, it is very inefficient to us humans who want bees to make lots of bees and be out working making lots of honey.  This year, I have made about seven walk away splits.  That results in about seventy queens, 63 of which reach adulthood only to be immediately killed.  If I could have sold them, it would have netted somewhere in the range of nearly $2000.  What a waste.  Here's the evidence.

These are five dead virgin queens I found near the entrances of hives consisting of walkaway splits or recent supercedures.  This goes to show how inefficient it is to produce queens or new hives in this manner.  It also shows that I could have had the black queen that I've been wanting.

The solution is one of my primary goals for this next year which is to try producing queens in the more standard method of grafting.  With grafting, from a single queenless hive, you could get dozens of virgin queens to be mated in mating nucs to replace ailing queens or to add new stock.  Most rejections happen before the larva gets fed much and if you want to control the natural selection aspect of it, you can by deciding how many queen cells go into a nuc.

Here's what a freshly hatched virgin queen looks like.

In fact, this one is most likely the winner who killed one of the ones above.  You can see her fuzz is still wet, and her exoskeleton still has a milky tone to it.  She was very fresh, there were still untouched queen cells in the hive.  This is the queen that will replace the beat up swarm queen I posted about earlier.

On a final note, I don't think this location can or should support more hives than this.  During this time of year especially, there is little rain and few flowers.  Brooding is limited, and there isn't much storing of honey or building of comb going on.  Robbing can be a problem if a hive is weakened in some way.  It may well be a good time to make splits.  All splits have been successful (except those being fed who also got robbed) in the last month or so.

Unfortunately, due to all this splitting, there won't be any honey this year.  It's going to be enough of a trial to make sure all hives are provisioned for winter.  This could get interesting.  Then again, maybe everything will work out.  Always look on the bright side of life.