Made some splits using queen cells. Made my splits left them queenless two days, installed queen cells, the next day they were supposed to hatch. When can I go in to check them? How long should I give them to start laying before I start worrying.
If you can stand it, wait 7-14 days before you look in there again. I can never wait that long though. I have heard of people pulling a frame and the queen flies off into never never land. I've not had that problem with mine, yet.
RayMarler, that's pretty much my plan also, except I was going to try one more time adding a queen cell to the Nucs that didn't have a laying queen. Do you think its better to just recombine them?
It all depends on what your goals are. For me, it's getting late in the year, I have enough hives to go into winter with, so any that aren't mated and laying will get joined back to others to increase size and resources to over winter.
I normally check after making up the nucs and giving cells in a couple days to be sure the cells were accepted and have emerged. Then I wait another 14 days to see eggs. This time I just made them up and left them alone as I am running out of space and don't need any more hives into winter this year. I have 8 mating nucs, and plan on keeping four good queens and joining the other four back so that I have 2 story nucs going into winter.
I give the cell 10 days after graft, and catch 16 days after giving cell. From the age of the larvae present, I would say that most queens start laying on day 11/12 after giving cell. Some wait a couple days longer.
Its been killing me but I found queen cells in one of my hives on August 4th. I removed two of them to put in another queenless swarm I caught that day then I closed them both up. I am going over today or tomorrow to see how things went. Ive went over a few times and observed the hives from the outside and things appeared normal but I haven't been inside yet.
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