At 08:57 01/06/96 -0700, you wrote: > Hello All, I was adding boxs to my bees that I srarted on April 6th of >this year and noticed something. Out of the 25 hives that I added boxs >and took a look inside , I saw a big difference in brood patterns. About >30% were solid and made me think about all the honey they will make.Then >come the ones with cells that were void, about 100 or more on a frame of >snip< Hi Roy and everyone else, I have already send details of this post to the list but I'm not sure if it got to you all, can someone out there confirm I am posting? My first post to this list, thank you all for your interesting topics in the past. I have been managing bees now for about 18 months so be nice please! Roy ref your post: I have a couple of colonies producing solid brood patterns (mainly dark european race)but they are much slower building up, ie; when other colonies were on 8 frames of brood the dark bees were on 3 or 4 but not a cell missed! I'm afraid I culled the queens as I need a really early build up for the oil seed rape. My request for help is: I raised my first batch of virgins yesterday using my friend's incubator. The problem I had was the delay in introducing the queens to mini nucs. I got tied up with swarms, helping old ladies etc and ended up putting the queens in about 8 pm last night. They hatched after lunch so were unfed for up to 6 or 7 hours. I used some bees from a local swarm and made up mini nucs before going to collect the virgins. About 1.5 hrs later I slipped them in to the closed mini nuc boxes, on checking this morning 8:00am the nucs are still roaring! I haven't released the bees yet. Any advice on what I am doing wrong and perhaps a better method. 24 hours later UPdate: Bees have now been released, I will check tonight to see if the virgins are still around, it looks like one lot have left their box and joined another around 6ft away. I have made some more minis up this time I found that taking young bees from the top super on a queen right colony works better as presumably these bees are relatively young. Regards Ken Black - Ken Black " ` Bay Tree Cottage " ` 76 East St, Fritwell _- -_`-_|'\ /` Bicester, _/ / / -' `~()() Oxfordshire, England. OX6 9QF \_\ _ /\-._/\/ 00441869345725 Fax:00441869256678 / | | email: [log in to unmask] '` ^ ^