You better not jus' be funnin' us LJ!
What a tease, yet I am listening. J
Not at all - but my post was only meant to be 'a bit of chat' about what I'm working on right now - more for general interest really, rather than presenting some kind of guaranteed 'blueprint' - as I'm still trying to figure out the exact underlying reasons behind what's occurring.
The other thing I want to stress is that I didn't figure out some sort of 'system' beforehand - what has resulted has come about largely by accident. All I've really done is to develop in a step-wise fashion what I've seen happening in front of me.
Perhaps if I give you guys some 'history' of events during this year ... ?
This Spring many of my colonies came out of Winter on the small size. So rather than set-up a Michael Palmer-style 'Brood Factory' using full-sized boxes, I set-up one using 5-frame nuc-boxes instead, 3 boxes high. Now 15 deep frames may not sound much to some of you guys, but for us over here that's a fairly big colony (and one which should normally produce plenty of drones).
To begin with, and for many of the weeks to come, my only aim was to produce brood - but - as a flow started there began to develop some competition for comb use, which resulted in 'mixed-content' combs - containing some stores, some brood etc. And so I took to sorting through the 3 boxes, and pulling out only those which were useful. So as not to 'export' the queen by mistake, when I found the frame she was walking around on, I placed that frame in a frame-holder which I then placed on top of the next-door hive - a Cloake Board stack.
Much to my horror, the queen promptly flew off that comb - not 'up into the sky' type of flying, but more of a glide downwards into the long grass. I won't describe either my reaction or language, but suffice it to say that I instantly abandoned the frame-sort.
Two days later I inspected that colony to check for emergency q/cells, only to find the queen happily sauntering about, as if nothing untoward had occurred - and so I simply carried on with what I had been doing before ... only for exactly the same thing to happen again. And yes, the very next day she was back.
Not wishing to chance my luck a third time, I decided to confine the queen in the bottom box, underneath a Queen Excluder - that way I could sort though the two top boxes without any concern, and when checking the bottom box I could return her frame quickly, and only transfer other frames up above the QX. It seemed like a good plan, and indeed this did work ok. Again - up until this time, the only objective was obtaining frames of brood on pre-drawn combs. Moving brood up above a QX did carry a risk of generating q/cells, but by luck none were ever started there.
Eventually I began to run out of pre-drawn combs and so started looking around for any 'odds and sods' that could be given to the bottom box. I had several wax-moth damaged combs which were badly holed, and so I gave those - which were quickly repaired and laid-up in. Purely on a whim, I then cut-away the drone cells on some 50/50 combs (half worker, half drone) and tried those. These were then 'repaired', but now with 100% worker cells.
The next step was to try some old frames which had been stripped of their combs, but still had wax 'footprints' all around them - BINGO - 100% worker cells again. And so that is how this 'method' (if indeed it can be called that) started.
There are lots of details which may or may not be relevant: the type of entrance (bottom, warm way) and the comb in Slot 1 may possibly be important, for example - because although there appears to be a pressing need for cells in which to lay, the first comb only contains pollen and some nectar, nothing more - so this comb appears to be treated differently to any other. When I first started working on this idea of drawing comb 'on demand', I set up the bottom box with the bare frame to be drawn in Slot 2, a stores comb in Slot 3, and dummies in Slots 4 and 5 - thinking that maybe a source of carbohydrate close by was important - but not so - the stores were promptly relocated above the QX, and that comb duly laid-up. So that's one thing I misjudged. Another was the presence of dummies - I thought I might need to 'force' the colony to draw-out one particular comb by eliminating choice - but this has not been necessary. There's still a helluva lot to learn about how to optimise this, and also discover it's limits. Not a single drone cell at the time of writing, but that's not to say it couldn't happen.
So hopefully you will begin to appreciate that my post wasn't intended either to tease or fool anybody - it was just intended as a small window into the kind of thing I do at this experimental apiary - I'm not into producing honey (can't anyway) and sales of bees only just about cover the sugar bill.
Hopefully I'll have more information in the weeks to come - I'm about to set up a second 15-frame stack, as I reckon this comb-drawing is something well-worth pursuing.
'best
LJ
