Hi Murray

>  Way off topic on this thread Dave,

It was interest, not a red herring

> to do ONE bar of grafts every day. A graft is 32 cells.

My grafting frames were originally 16 cells on a National width, but I 
ended up ignoring the two end positions as they were the ones that 
failed most.

> Average 
> acceptance is 22 to 26 ( though we have had 31 a few times, never a 32, 

14 out of 14 in a row was common enough, but acceptance thought to be 
slightly higher, difficult to say as I used to count the number of 
failed cups or if the take was very low the number of cells. Majority 
were less than five failures out of 28. Middle range numbers were rare 
and anything as low as five or less cells was usually scrapped.

I did not graft every day, but to a pre arranged schedule and did a 
batch of two cell bar frames at a time (56 grafts) this number dwindled 
to 30 to 35 a batch by the time we were counting mated queens.

My motherlines were a number of lines kept in five frame nucs, usually 
about seven, but only about half of the batches came from these queens, 
the rest coming from queens of developing colonies that were in five 
frame nucs or any other colony that attracted my attention.

(if I was doing this over again I would have had six frame and eight 
frame nucs for final assessment purposes rather than just five framers)

The work of raising the cells was done in the full sized hives, often 
using Harry Cloake's method, the cells being transferred to mating nucs 
(bigger than Apidea)

> As I mentioned earlier we try to mate the queens away from the apiary of 
> their birth,

I did not have that luxury, because my drone raising was done in a group 
of 55 hives that were used as cell builders (and anything else that was 
needed). Apart from these hives that were overproducing drones, most of 
the other colonies on site were nucs of some sort or another and so 
would be producing very few drones.

> 'guidelines, not tramlines'

I have not heard it stated that way before, but I wholeheartedly agree!


Regards & Best 73s, Dave Cushman, G8MZY
http://melliferabees.net Email: [log in to unmask]
Short FallBack M/c, Build 7.21/2.01
Son of ORAC M/c, Build 5.o1/2.o1

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