Folks,
Since All is Quiet on the Western Front, allow me to help our brain
muscles exercised:
While digging up other archives, I found Allen’s even-handed article on
the “Inferiority Assumption of the Emergency Queen Cells” an informative
and interesting piece, indeed. Here is the whole enchilada:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=000001bee1f3%
24a8f84ce0%2402000003%40allend&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Demergency%
2Bqueens%2Bgroup:sci.agriculture.beekeeping%26num%3D25%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%
26ie%3DUTF-8%26filter%3D0
Granted that Emergency Queen Cells from older eggs are inferior or at best
a hit-and-miss operation, we routinely knock off these old QC’s after
three to four days so that the unsealed “younger” queen cells to develop.
So far so good?
While splitting, let’s assume that you gave the queen right colony, an
empty drone comb, put in at the center, as in Hopkins’ Method. Since
knocking off old cells involves two trips to apiary, anyway, how about
simply NOT giving the eggs at all to the split for a few days so that
the “orphaned” bees become desperate for a missing mother, to wax the
rhetoric? Besides bees do not always start building queen cells
immediately. A day or two later, insert into the split, the freshly-laid
batch you had put in at the center of the queen-right colony when
splitting, so that now they will build queen cells from a day-old eggs,
*assuming* such uniformity in egg-laying is feasible. Of course, given
the irregular stages of brood development, sometimes it, too, is difficult
to find a slate of sealed and other broods without any eggs; however, if
one uses many colonies to split into one, finding such frames are not
entirely impossible. What do you say? A crazy idea?
Thinking out loud, suspecting some of you may have already done this.
Yoon
Shawnee, OK
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