requeened, any use for queen cells?

[justusflynns]

I successfully finished requeening today. At te same time, I went through each frame and removed all of the queen cells I could find. There were a bazillion of them. Is there any good/profitable use I can make of them at this point...other than fish bait? I don't have any fancy equipment if that would be necessary. I'm sure I'll have more in my other hive also, but it started sprinkling as I was finishing up with the first hive. Thanks in advance for any help.

[rogerw05465]

Sure you bet! Get the royal jelly out of them and freeze it (assuming there is some). If you aren't using it next spring to help raise queens, there will be a local breeder who will love you dearly for the donation, and probably give you a queen or two for your efforts.

[dfortune]

How do you use the royal jelly to feed the queens. I didnt know the bees had any trouble making enough of their own.

[RayMarler]

Some queen breeders use royal jelly to prime the cups when grafting.

[AramF]

This is actually a very good question. Can one collect enough royal jelly from queen cells and artificially inject it into the developing queen cells to gve them a super boost in nutrition? I do dry grafting, priming is not something I am interested in doing. But I do graft extra to choose the best. If I could sacrifice inferior cells to give extra boost to the larger ones, that would be ideal.

The question is what is a good method for injecting it into the cell, put it on the bottom or inject it from the top of the cup. How much extra can you put into the cell? It seems to only be usefull while the queen is still a larvae. I guess I need to find out when the queen pupates.

[RayMarler]

The worm floats on top of the jelly, so priming is the way to do it. I can't think of a way to do what you are thinking of. Besides, is the royal jelly on day one the same as royal jelly on day two, or three, etc? I myself have doubts that it is. I believe the consistency, if nothing else, is different, and the exact ingredients may be different as well. So doing what you are suggesting seems, to me, to be impossible to improve the health and strength of the queen worm being raised.