>>Remember, I don’t need 100% to survive the winter, say I need 5 out of a bank of 10 where 8 of those survived.
A few years ago I attended a presentation by Liz Huxter of Kettle Valley Queens. She and Terry have been doing queens in Grand Forks BC for years and years. It was enlightening and inspiring on this subject of wintering spare queens. Apparently they tried an experiment many years ago, they use 4 way boxes for mating nucs and that year they did an extra round of cells. Instead of putting empty boxes away for the winter, they put away the 4 ways with mating colonies in them, and freshly mated young queens. She said they put 1000 queens to bed that winter, then in the spring when they went thru the boxes, they had 700 live queens. At that point she looked at the audience and asked 'do you know what 700 queens are worth at that time of the year?', so we decided to give it a try.
We are relatively small by comparison, so the first year we built 2 sets. The equipment Liz showed us was built in medium depth boxes, but our setup is a deep box with a fixed divider that allows for 20 half size frames. We add follower boards to further split each side into two compartments of 5 half frames. Entrances are just a hole drilled into the box, sized for a wine cork in case we want to plug one for some reason. First year worked well, so I built another in the second year and we've run 3 of them over the winter since.
Over time our success rate wintering in these mating nucs has been better than wintering in full size boxes. What we have found, every year we lose one or two thru September during the time when wasps are bad around here. Those quadrants are ultimately robbed out by the bigger colonies in the yard. Dunno which is cause and effect, are they weakend by wasps then robbed by the bees, or are they weakened by the robbers then finished off by the wasps ? Dunno, dont care, it happens. What we have seen over the years, of those colonies still alive in the mating nucs on November 1, have survived thru till April 1. This is not just one year lucky, it's been consistent now for 4 winters, everything alive on Nov 1 has been alive on April 1 in 3 out of 4 winters, and this last winter all but one made it thru. Sometimes they are very tiny, but they are alive and have viable queens.
A well stocked queen bank is going to use up the resources of 2 or 3 colonies. That same amount of resources will fill 2 or 3 of the 4 way boxes, with 4 queens per box. If you run a single bank with a dozen queens, then failure of the bank colony loses all the queens. Conversely, running 3 4way boxes with a dozen queens, failure of one compartment just loses one queen.
Personally, I think in your situation, to attempt having queens earlier than you can make them I would suggest trying to winter in 4 way boxes rather than a single bank, wither it's indoors or out, same issues apply. The old discussion about eggs and baskets comes to mind....
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