Hi Guys,
I've reared tens of thousands of queens in my own little queen business and have a few observations. Now I going to stir the pot :>)
The best queens are raised by healthy, well fed bees without any interference from man. When we attempt to rear queens disruption and colony degradation occurs. So, as queen rearers, the best queens will be reared when disruptions are minimized and any degradation shifted from the queen rearing functions to another aspect of the colony.
Early, in my queen rearing, I tested priming versus non-priming. I was using standard grafting tools, in a very hot, dry climate. Priming provided somewhat better results than dry grafting.
Royal jelly is very easy to obtain and didn't need to be purchased. If grafting on a 4 - 3 schedule, just pull a few three day old cells from a previous graft. The royal jelly is fresh, so no nutrition degradation. It's from your hives. So, no disease worries. Three or four cells worth of royal jelly diluted will prime a thousand cups.
Knowing that the bees increase the sugar content of royal jelly for a queen, I thought maybe I could do better. What would happen if I increased the sugar content a little more? So, I tried adding honey at various amounts to the distilled water used to dilute the royal jelly. Amounts varied from just a trace through 50%. When you're grafting more than a thousand at a pop, it's easy to sacrifice a few bars for a test. Results, any messing with the royal jelly negatively impacted acceptance. And as sugar increased queen rearing became intermorph rearing.
Up till then, I'd lost sight of one important aspect. And it's real easy to do this when queen rearing. That is, the bees simply do bee stuff best. That means we must cooperate as much as possible with the bees. Our job is provide the best possible environment with as little interference as possible. All our methods should be evaluated from this perspective.
So, why did I prime those cells? It was a better way to approximate a natural situation than dry grafting with a standard tool, that removes only the larva and leaves their pool of royal jelly behind.
Are there ways to rear queens that involve no disturbance to the young larva. Methods and tools have been invented that do just that. Swarm cells can be used. The Alley and Hopkins methods work. A brass tool has been used in Eastern Europe that will surgically extract a larva with lower cell and base intact. And a modern derivation where plastic contraptions allow a larva and royal jelly pool to be pulled out intact. But most of these don't really work very well in a commercial environment. Failure rates are too high. Or production rates too low/unpredictable.
With a Chinese grafting tool, the larva and royal jelly pool are removed with minimal disturbance. After converting to this tool without priming, my grafting take improved beyond what it was with a standard grafting tool with priming. See
http://bwrangler.litarium.com/grafting-tools/
Regards
Dennis