Peter wrote:- I moved to the Chinese grafting tool. These originally had a
bamboo 'pusher' which seemed to work very well; with practise it became the
tool of choice. I find the latest versions with plastic 'pushers' are not
as satisfactory.
This early version was the one I used and found it very satisfactory. Have
not seen the latest version.
>The drawback with the Chinese tool is that with very small larvae it is
easy to squash them between the tongue and the pusher when trying to push
them off into the cup.
I never found this an issue. Some tongues were stiffer than others but
could be softened if you licked them. Occasionally I rejected one because
of the stiff tongue but at the cost they were this was not an issue.
>The difference is probably 2 day old larvae vs 12 hour old larvae (I seem
to remember reading that Brother Adam would sit up all night waiting for
eggs to hatch!).
> Does it really make any difference to the quality of the finished queen?
Woyke published work to show that after 24 hours old the queen produced had
less ovarioles than those that came from grafted larvae less than 24 hours.
I found if you put an empty comb in the breeder queen hive about 4 days
before grafting then you could graft all the larvae as they were no more
than 24 hours old. However on some occasions I did not use some of the
larger larvae just to make sure they were less than 24 hours old. This was
because some eggs may have hatched out in less than 3 days.
>We are usually told to harvest cells 10 days after grafting but... cells
that are grafted at 12 hours will be one and a half days behind those
grafted when they are two days old, so presumably should not be moved until
day 11 or even 12.
I used to put the cells into sawdust in an "esky" (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esky) and put them in an incubator before
use. I used the polystyrene version. This way it stopped that early queen
getting out and destroying the cells. Leaving them in the hive till the
12th day can often have disastrous results.
Trevor Weatherhead
Australia
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