Jay Smith wrote:

In using the grafting method the larvae are left in the worker cells for two
days where they are sparingly fed, for the bees are making workers of them.
If much younger larvae are used they will perish, for they cannot stand such
rough treatment. If you will examine the larvae two days old you will see
very little bee milk around them. In fact, they are being "rationed." My
experience has proved without a shadow of a doubt that such larvae have been
starved in such a manner that they will never become fully developed queens
no matter how lavishly they are fed after that. etc.

Hmm. I wonder if they got permission to put Jay's book up on the internet?
Just putting the copyright notice doesn't really cover it y'know.

But on to the meat of the matter. Jay's half right here. A starved larvae
won't make much of a queen, but what is the solution to that?  First, the
queen should be confined to one frame in a good strong single. Then, when
the eggs hatch they will be flooded with royal jelly. Another trick is to
put a frame of eggs into the cell builder. If they don't have any other
brood (as in a queenless cell builder, they will flood these babies.

The, when you transfer the larvae into the cups, you can prime the cells
with some royal jelly. I used to raise thousands of cells back in the 1980s
and I never primed the cups, but if you are raising a few dozen or a few
hundred, it sure doesn't hurt. However, the crux of the matter is in the
starters. These bees have to be aching for a new queen. I used to use the
same queenless hives for starting and finishing the cells. What I did was to
shake fresh bees into the hives a few hours before I put a new batch of cups
in.

I would put new cups in twice a week and keep the finished cells in the same
hives until the day before they were to introduced. The last day I kept them
in an incubator. You can tell right away if the cell builder is no good.
They won't start very many cells and the cells are apt to be runty. The
problem is -- a lot of times the queen breeder is on a tight schedule with
order to fill and may go ahead and use some runty cells. Bad plan!

-- 
pb

-- Visit www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l for rules, FAQ and  other info ---