David Eyre wrote:
 
> On 20 Mar 98 at 14:17, Elroy Rogers wrote:
>
> > boxes for mating with separate entrances at both ends. My bigest
> > problem could be cold weather which could keep virgin queens from
> > mating.
>
> We can't start raising queens till the first/second week of May as
> drones don't fly freely till the end/first week of June. All you
> need to do is work out your dates, and don't compromise, there really
> is nothing to gain, but unmated or poorly mated queens don't do
> anyone any good!!
 
I Think our area is 2 to 3 weeks ahead of your area, in this part of
Minnesota we usually have at least 10 days of 90 degree weather in may. I
have raised some queens last fall in september to see if they would mate
at cool temps, they did. I feed the nucs sugar water until the end of
october, all queens layed 5 to 6 frames of brood.  Although the ten nucs
that where produced didn't make it past the end of november, all the bees
were supposed to be shipped to california at the first part of October.
If they had they would probably made it all winter.
 
An advantage I will have over other northern beekeepers is that my bees
wintered in california, and will have been used for 3 different
pollinations. I know pollinations are not always the best for bees but
they will be 6 weeks ahead of everyone elses bees here in Minnesota when
they return in the middle of april. Since they are 6 weeks ahead they
should have plenty of drones, as well as having 500 colonies to use as a
drone pool, I should be able to get some early queens. The yard where the
bees are kept until june 1st is excellent in that there is a large groove
on the west and north side with large barn and honey house on the east
side. This area  gets 5 to 10 degrees warmer than the area temps.
 
I had made a deal with a large commercial beekeeper to do all the work
and spend all my own money on queen rearing equipment, but use his
colonies for queen rearing. We will evenly split the queens raised, I
want about 200 queens myself he wants 400 to 600 queens.
 
Last spring I purchased 6 queens from Glen apiary in california I plan on
using those queens for breeding because most of my other colonies only
produced 10 lbs of honey where they produced close to 100lbs. All others
in this area only produced an average of 20 lbs. I know of 1 commercial
operation that is out of business because of last years cold weather, but
thats another subject. Using the Queens from Glen apiary that are totally
unrelated to the other colonies should keep inbreeding a non-isue in my
case.
 
So as you can see my biggest problem is cold weather at the time when the
virgin queens need nice weather for mating flights. I am planning on 60%
failure at first which should decrease to 30 to 40 % as weather gets
better. I would like to get at least 100 queens from first batch, so this
means shooting for 250 queens first week. I have 1 jenter box now but
plan on ordering 1 more, each one is capable of producing 100 queens
every 4 days. I also want to try to do some grafting of the extra larvae
not in the cell plugs, there can be over 200 of these seems a same to
just wash them out.
 
All the queens that are going to be produced are to be used in two queen
colonies, this will be another safe guard against poorly mated queens.
The reason we want 2 queen colonies is that last spring we had such cold
weather the bees had very few days to fly until june 15th. I remmember
putting on the second brood chamber on the 4th of july with a lot of my
nucs that were started the last week of april. Some I was just tired of
waiting for so I put newspaper in between, so as to let the bees decide
when they need the room. When july came the bees were really busy, but
they had already missed half of the sweet clover bloom due to cold
weather. I could see everything blooming at different times of spring but
when the temps barely reached 50 the bees just couldn't fly very far. So
I figure 2 queen colonies will be twice as strong on those cold springs
and will not have to take so long to build up. I am still baffled why
those 6 queens that were put on 3 frames of brood produced so much more
than the others started a month earlier, and were 8 frame nucs.
 
Well thats about all this beehaver knows so far, I am trying to cover all
bases to keep out failure.
So if you see something that won't work let me know. Allen Dick convinced
me on the importance of treating for nosema, after reading his posts I
did some reading on nosema.
 
Elroy
 
 
 
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