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Date: | Wed, 17 Aug 2011 23:59:23 +0100 |
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Many thanks to all those who responded, the answers were most informative
and I will now experiment with provisioning the cages with honey and pollen
to see whether that makes a difference.
I asked Thorne's for their views and they thought that the bees would feed
virgins through the mesh, a view shared, I note, by Larry Connor in his
article in the August ABJ.
The question was asked: why would anyone want to bank virgins? This perhaps
a natural question for a large-scale producer to ask as he will always have
surplus cells to hand. However, for a small-scale producer like me, rearing
cells takes a significant amount of time and effort, so good 'spare' cells
are very valuable, especially when it might be possible to use the virgins
within a few days.
Our beekeeping operation has just two 'employees' - my wife and me - and
sometimes events (such as the wonderful English weather) may conspire to
make it impossible for us move mated queens on from mating nucs in time for
us to distribute cells on the tenth day as planned, so again we might want
to bank the virgins, if only for a day or two.
We may also wish to distribute surplus virgins to other members of our
association and this again might require us to hold them for a short while.
Best wishes
Peter
52.194546N, -1.673618W
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