Just curious. Queen hatching? Why are you hatching queens in your incubator? How do you keep emerged queens separated?Which one is better for queen hatching?
I have a friend who uses a retrofitted refrigerator. But his cells aren't in it very long at all. He gets them into mating nucs or gets them sold in a timely manner.Yeah, if you are raising lots of queens then you need a bigger unit.
What is the price range for this incubator to worth the buy?
if improving the bee genetic for better bees and the over all queen quality then lauri has a few years ahead of me. I am still an ever learning student here. Like her, i found out that i have the talent to make some good queens and share what i had learned too in beekeeping.
So i started experimenting. I am still learning from what good information she can give here. Lauri has a very big heart to share what she has learned over the years as well as many improvement of her set up that she developed over the years of beekeeping. For that i am very grateful to have a model to follow. Still have a lot to learn from her. Thanks, lauri.
You see the whole purpose of hatching queens inside an incubator is to buy you more time. I had lost so many good queens over the season because not being able to get to them in a timely manner. Sometime they would stick together even though they are big and fat queen cells. Separating them will either kill one or the other. At times a very hard decision to make which one to live or die.
At the same time you are controlling which genetic and the queen quality that you like to keep. It is very good for ii or ai too if you want to take that route someday. You will not be begging people of where to buy the next queen from over wintering of a lost queen. I had experienced with chasing for a mated queen in the middle of the early spring to no avail. Nobody would want to spare what they scarcely have just out of winter.
Over here we have the perfect environment to make some very early spring queens from. See pics below! I believe having an incubator will help me in this process to increase the queen number in this successful venture.
If you see her set up, lauri has the roller cage to separate her newly emerged queens. This will be the set up that i am using but use window screen #8 hardware wire sheet instead of plastic roller cages. I like to make my queen rearing process as much fun as possible with innovation in mind. I.e.#1 of many, to make multi-cell cages to hold multiple queen cells. At the same time able to spare a few good quality queens to the needy, like me.
I want to take the frustration out of beekeeping as much as possible to the many newbees out there. I had many frustration when i got started in the beginning killing more bees than raising them successfully. But thanks to beesource i had learned a lot from the many contributor over the years.
There are many improvement that you can do in beekeeping with an incubator. At the same time there are many questions i have that i might find in the queen rearing process. Mainly it is to hold and to control the timing of the beekeeping process. Don't you agree?
One could probably rotate the box to get less temperature difference between upper and lower compartments. Try horizontal instead vertical.... but as lauri pointed out, there may be a temp difference between The top and bottom shelves. ...
One reason is to sell virgin queens. a real pain to catch every one out of a nuc.Just curious. Queen hatching? Why are you hatching queens in your incubator? How do you keep emerged queens separated?
There are many types of them. Some of them a capable to read the humidity of the environment as well.sjj - Do you mind posting the name and model number of those usb temp data loggers? I would like to read up on them some.