[winevines]

Beginner queen rearing question here.

Really my motivation is swarm prevention, but I am trying to see if I can have any success rearing queens by taking frames of queen cells out while at the same time trying to prevent swarming in my production hives.

I took two deep frames out of a hive, each one with an uncapped queen cell and brood and put them into a Kelly mating nuc along with a frame of honey/pollen plus a jar of sugar syrup. I think these cells were still at larvae stage as they looked more like a white glob than a pupae.
Sort of like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Weiselzellen_68a.jpg

Is there any chance of success with this approach or do you always need to use more fully developed queen cells?

 

[Beeslave]

If you are using swarm cells the stage does not seem to matter as long as you put young bees into the nuc. Be carefull when using nucs and swarm cells. If the cells came from a hive with a 3/4" bottom board space and the nuc bottom space is shorter you can squash the cell.