Cloake Board Observations

[D. Murrell]

Hi Guys,

Well I've been fooling around with a Cloake board and have an observation.

With most queen rearing methods, the bees are constantly trying to leave the swarm box, the double screened hive body, an elevated hive body, etc. where the cells are started. With the Cloake board, the bees are trying to get into where the cells are being started. Bee density increases with the Cloake rather than decreases like most of those other methods. So, you know what the starter will be like when it's setup.

A free flying starter finisher can be run to this effect by switching locations with its support hive. But just inserting or removing a slide is much easier than moving hives.

Regards
Dennis

[George Fergusson]

Dennis, could you outline the basic traditional cloake board technique?

[Jon McFadden]

Hi Dennis,
I can't agree more. The whole point to the system is not having to manipulate bees when the weather isn't that conducive to working the little gals.
I used the system for the first time this year and it was a definite winner.
4 weeks before grafting, the hive entrance (on the bottom) is reversed and blocked. The Cloake Board or Cell Door is placed above the brood nest with the slide out. This forces the bees to reorient their entrance to above the cloake board. When the slide goes in, the bottom entrance is opened. Bees leaving the bottom have been conditioned to use the upper entrance. I'll post the results under "Cell Door" at http://nordykebeefarm.com/forum/forum_topics.asp?FID=6
along with some shots of queen cells.

[wayacoyote]

George,
Read this:
http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/method2.html

Waya

[Jon McFadden]

Yep, same system but better graphics. One difference is that I used a different breeder queen. The queen I chose was superior to the cell builder. The cell builder was chosen because of strength.
We didn't follow through with additional queen rearing in this cell builder, but we could have. Instead, we used the bees above the cell door as a nursery colony and set them off as a seperate colony.
We wound up building baby nucs to mate the virgins. These were constructed for $1 ea and worked. Now I need to post the drawings.

[George Fergusson]

OK, I'm clear on this.

[D. Murrell]

Hi George and Everyone,

Try:

http://www.beesource.com/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=5;t=000219#000003

There's some references back to the original articles in the b mags.

Regards
Dennis

[Jon McFadden]

Hi Dennis,
The 1993 article referenced is the same one that I used to make my Cloake Board in 2000. The name Bee Culture chose to call it was "Cell Door", which is what I call the construction information I have posted to:
http://nordykebeefarm.com/forum/forum_topics.asp?FID=6