This year I'd like to graft a few of my own queens, about a half-dozen or so. Really just for fun as I don't need a lot of new queens thanks to few losses over the winter plus swarms that I'm likely to catch. I have about 20 hives spread over four yards.
I've read about cell starters and finishers, something that seems overly complex for the scale I'm thinking. Can I just use a nuc for the entire process? I'm thinking I'd load a 5 frame nuc with a couple frames of capped brood, a frame of honey, and a frame of pollen, then shake in another couple frames of bees. Wait a couple days, then put in the fifth frame with a half dozen or so grafts. Seems to me that this should be plenty of bees and resources for make this number of queens - after all, I've done splits like this and easily gotten that many queen cells.
An obvious follow up would be that if so, how many queen cells could such an approach handle?
I've read about cell starters and finishers, something that seems overly complex for the scale I'm thinking. Can I just use a nuc for the entire process? I'm thinking I'd load a 5 frame nuc with a couple frames of capped brood, a frame of honey, and a frame of pollen, then shake in another couple frames of bees. Wait a couple days, then put in the fifth frame with a half dozen or so grafts. Seems to me that this should be plenty of bees and resources for make this number of queens - after all, I've done splits like this and easily gotten that many queen cells.
An obvious follow up would be that if so, how many queen cells could such an approach handle?