Took the Plunge with OTS queen rearing.

[pistolpete]

Today was the day.   25 degrees and no wind,  saw the first dandelions of the year and the first cherry blossoms are peaking out.   So I went into my strong hive (2 deeps full of bees and brood).   I pulled three frames of mostly capped brood and the old queen.  The queen was on the third frame I looked at .   To that I added 2 empty drawn frames and one blank frame and a styrofoam follower board.  Then I shook in a frame of brood bees and put on the inner cover.   On top of the inner cover I put another box with some wonky honey frames from last year.     The only thing missing is a good frame of pollen,  I'll try to add one soon.

Now for the OTS part.  I looked through the top deep and found a frame with young larvae.  I notched about 4 of them.   I wanted queen cells on 2 frames, but was unable to locate more newborn larvae, so I notched several eggs on another frame  (we'll see if they do anything with those). 

Now I get to see what happens.  We have one more warm day and then a couple of cold ones with overnight frost.  Hopefully the Nuc manages to stay warm enough. 

I'll update in a few days (hopefully with some nice queen cell pictures). 

[Jen]

Like the sound of that process! 

[LazyBkpr]

Sounds like you did good!
   The notched Larvae will be capped first, the eggs two or three days later depending on how old they are. Notching eggs works, you can even cell punch eggs and it will work, you just have to adjust your time table accordingly. It is hard to judge how old an egg is. Might be freshly laid or might be three days getting ready to dissolve the egg shell and fall over by day four.
   Finding freshly hatched Larvae that are smaller than an egg, yet are NEAR eggs usually gets you one day old Larvae and makes the timing easier. (So does a good lighted magnifying glass!) Just be prepared to pull the larvae notched cells a couple days earlier than the egg notched cells.

[iddee]

I did the same for a friend on Apr. 21, without notching any cells. Yesterday, we went in and found 3 frames with queen cells. We set up 2 more nucs and left a frame with cells in the mother hive. If successful, one hive becomes four. We will check in 2 weeks for new eggs.

[apisbees]

Pete Do you have enough drones in your area for the queens to mate with when the time comes? the guys down here are only starting to graft now and we are a week and a half ahead in the season by dandelion and cherry bloom. You may be OK if a near by beekeeper has bees feeding pollen supplements to encourage early brood and drone development.

[pistolpete]

You are right Apisbees, I am pushing the schedule.  I'm reasonably sure this hive would swarm in another 2 weeks (they already had a few queen cups started).   There are drones in the hive, so I'm hoping that in two weeks when the queen takes her mating flights there will be enough of them flying around.   The old queen is a great producer, so I can always put her back in there if things don't turn out well.    I will be repeating this process with my other strong hive in a couple of weeks too.

[pistolpete]

About time to update this post.   In the end everything turned out great.  I made four Nucs all together.  Two with one year old queens, one that raised their own queen, and one that I gave to a friend who had a caged queen.   The OTS notching worked great,  I got gorgeous queen cells where I wanted them.   I checked yesterday on the Nuc that was reaising queen cells.  There was one queen cell with the "lid" hanging off of it and all the others were still sealed.   I looked around and the virgin queen was scrambling around on one of the other queen cells, bumping it off.   I had a look in some of the surplus queen cell and the immature queens in there were already dead.  Pretty neat to see that in progress.     Now I have to hope for some nice mating flight weather.

this is a picture of the Q cell frame from my queen rearing nuc. 

[jb63]

Thx for the up date Pete.Keep us posted as to how your nucs are doing.

[LazyBkpr]

Pat yourself on the back for a Job well done!   Congratulations!!!

[Jen]

Pete- ""I had a look in some of the surplus queen cell and the immature queens in there were already dead.""

I've removed many queen cells this last 6 weeks, how can you tell if the queen inside is dead?

[pistolpete]

I'm not 100% sure they were dead, but they showed no sign of life.  I seem to recall that drone brood uncapped at a similar stage wriggles a little bit.

[tecumseh]

the reasons for queens never emerging from their cell can be several.  the first casualty is generally low night time temperature where by the cluster shrinks leaving the queen cells uncovered.  the second most likely casualty is mishandling by the beekeeper < any kind of bump or ever turning the cells up side down at certain stages of their development can mean a queen will never emerge from her cell.  thanks for sharing your experience here pistolpete.

[Intheswamp]

Thanks for your post, too, tec.  I always thought it was a bad idea to turn cells upside down, just didn't seem "right" to me.  I've been watching some nuc building and queen cell raising youtube videos and on one a somewhat rookie (like me) pulled a nice queen-cell frame from a hive that was loaded with queen cells...and he promptly flipped it upside down with the tips pointing up...I shuddered.  I guess they may have been past the critical stage and it might not have caused any harm, but....   

Ed

[pistolpete]

now you have me thinking: Did I ever flip these cells?   As a general rule I never flip any frames upside down.  I rotate the top bar to vertical and then rotate the frame around that axis to look at both sides. 

Right now the waiting is killing me.   I looked at the queen in the Nuc today.  She's still pretty small even though she should have gone on mating flights a couple of days ago and definitely not laying.  She is scuttling about looking at cells though.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed.   The other hives are way too big to look for a young queen.

[Intheswamp]