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Best way to raise 1-2 queen cells?

2K views 5 replies 6 participants last post by  VikingJim 
#1 ·
Often times, I do walkaway splits because they are simple, but is their an easy trick to raise and mate 1-2 high quality queens without messing with a cloake board or grafting?

A lot of times with a walkaway, they will pack the brood nest with so much honey and pollen during the bloodless period that the new queen doesn't seem to want to lay until you drop in some empty frames, and obviously also I'd like to avoid broodless periods
 
#2 ·
Well , how about putting a frame of brood/eggs , a couple of frames of honey and pollen and a couple of empties <foundation or bare> in a nuc box and walking away ? You'd probably want to supplement with a couple of frames of bees shaken in too . Give 'em a few days then check for queen cells , assuming you find some you can transfer some to another nuc , along with brood/food/and more bees . I'd feed the nuc/nucs if I did this .
I'm a beginner , but I just this week did basically that from a split . See my threads regrets/no regrets to see how that worked out . If I had several hives I'd pull the eggs from my best one for this ...
 
#3 ·
There is no easy trick to avoid the broodless period and other things.

But the wastage of resources can be minimised by using very small nucs to mate the queen in rather than a full walk away split. Which means that in addition to the wastage that occurs in a large split while waiting for the queen to mate, if she fails to mate entirely, the most that can be lost is the small nuc rather than a whole box of bees. After the queen has mated and is laying, then resources can be added to boost the hive and take advantage of the new queens laying capacity.
 
#5 ·
Exactly!
we make what we call "egg nucs." Just 3 frames of brood of all stages. Maybe an extra shake of bees if they need it, but careful not to make them too big or they might swarm. This way, you can pull 1-3 nucs from a hive, leaving the old queen to rebuild. You can always combine them later.
 
#4 ·
Make a good hive queenless by putting the queen in a small nuc. Then in 5 days go through the hive and find 2 frames with good cells on them - destroy all other. Then put those frames in the nuc and direct release the queen back into the hive. before the 10th day move one of the cell frames into its own mating nuc.

I don't know about the best way, but this should work.
 
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