Jamming in a graft??

I am leaving on an extended camping trip with my sons soon and wanted to jam in one more unplanned graft on Friday. I understand the concept of the steps to building your queenless cell builder starting 10 days before your graft. Sadly, I did not expect to do this before leaving and didn't plan ahead but I have the resources building fast in other hives to build mating nucs and want to try it.

Am I setting myself up for failure?

I did put a frame of dark drawn comb in my breeder queen colony this morning to graft from on Friday afternoon. If tomorrow morning I separate my queenright portion below with an excluder and mostly larva frames are above the excluder can I pull this off? Morning of the graft I will make the queenless section on it's own bottom board with pollen frame and those nearly capped brood as well as many shakes of frames of nurse bees. In the afternoon I check for emergency cells, do the graft and stick it into this overflowing hive and put a gallon of feed on it.

I am missing something. Enlighten me.

Cheers!

What say you? Can you jam this in just a few days?

I'd give it a try...but I think it may work a little better if you separate the 2 hives ASAP (the E-cells actually HELP you in this "time-squeeze" scenario, by getting the nurse bees "up to speed" producing RJ for them...just be sure you get them all out), and also be sure to brush/shake in a few frames of extra bees from the parent colony, to compensate for the foragers who'll return there.

Aside from that, sounds like a workable plan to me...so long as nothing goes wrong while you're gone. *fingers crossed*

Thanks Robherc. I will go and make the queenless colony this morning. Hopefully this stimulates enough RJ production for a good take.

I make my queenless cellbuilders (5 frames nuc with lots of bees) 24 hours before I graft and don't have a problem getting them to build cells.

cklspencer-
Yes, I don't think it'll be a problem for them to build cells after even less than 24hrs...the intent of making it earlier, however, is to raise the quality of the cells by getting the nurse bees "into practice" making RJ for the emergency cells they start, so they generally do a better job of building out larger, better supplied, queen cells for you. That's a tip I picked up (and maybe modified slightly) from advice given by far more experience beeks (ok, so there's really no comparison, as most of "they" were pro. queen breeders) than myself. ;) (if you have time for the longish read, see the old thread "Moving from OK Queens...to GREAT Queens" that specialkayme started.

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is to raise the quality of the cells by getting the nurse bees "into practice" making RJ for the emergency cells they start, so they generally do a better job of building out larger, better supplied, queen cells for you.

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I shake my nurse bees into my cell starter. Nurse bees should already be producing RJ, no reason to try and get them producing it. I keep it going by adding new brood every 7 to 14 days. Doing this I almost always get large healthy cells and the few that might be small (maybe 2-4 out of 45) I pull out and don't use. I have been running 45 grafts every 7 days and moving them to the incubator after they are capped. I can keep the cell builders going all season this way. When I pick my frams of bood I try to find emerging brood with some young larvae. The young uncapped larvae keeps the chance of a mite from getting in the queen cells. I just make sure I check for queen cells in that frame when doing my 24-48 hour check of the cells. By the time I get to my 4th week of grafts my cell builders are busting out with bees.