Picture says it all.

[fordtractornut]

The pictures shown here are examples of the first round of queens i grafted in may.
One of the pictures shows the brood pattern.
IMG_1298.jpgIMG_1303.jpgIMG_1304.jpgIMG_1311.jpgIMG_1312.jpg

[djastram]

Real nice ford.

dj

[ralph3]

cool queens. do they all have the same mother? i'm partial to the stripes. (:

[fordtractornut]

no, they have different mothers. the two darker colored ones are grafted from a russian mix queen. the lighter one is from a queen that i grafted last year that survived the winter in iowa with a deep and a medium hive body. The nest step is to start the varroa treatments. in one of the pictures you can see two mites.

I couldn't realy tell you the breed of the mother queens. I use the performance of the colonies to determine who to graft from.