On Sunday, June 22, we met at Kristien’s house to graft the cells for Round 3 of the queen rearing project.
We first checked on the nurse nucs we had made up on Saturday. The deep nuc still seemed strong; however, it did seem that some of the bees had flown back to their original hives. The medium nuc, in which most of bees were from Liz’s yard with a couple frames shaken from Kristien’s yard, seems to have maintained nearly the original density of bees.
Next we searched for 2 frames with appropriate aged larvae for grafting. The first frame was from a queen named Lisa and the second from a queen named George!
Now to the grafting!
Everybody gave it a try!
We installed the grafted queen cups on to bars for deep nuc (sorry no pictures!) and scraped the medium frame and pressed the cells into the remaining comb.
Side 1
Side 2
We then installed the frames in their respective nucs. We noted that there seems to have been a sharp drop in the nectar flow over the past week as evidenced by how much of the stores we provided to the nucs had been used. We have agreed to feed the nucs about a pint per day while they are working on the queen cells.
Our plan is to meet on June 29th to assess the cells and place them into nucs.
Glad to see Andrew was back! Did you have the sense that this session went any better than previous sessions?
I think we are feeling pretty good about this effort. In general, there was less royal jelly with the larvae in the cells. We took that as another indicator of the nectar dearth. As always there are too many changed variables to figure out precisely what is making whatever difference we end up observing. If we do this enough, we should eventually become more proficient. Right?