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Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology

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Subject:
From:
"Janet L. Wilson" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 6 Aug 2018 13:02:34 -0400
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>The queen larvae continue to feed for up to 2 days post capping, and
>consume a huge amount of jelly during that period.  The actual feeding
>interval is more like 6 days.  Still remarkable how rapidly those
>developing queens can gain weight.

Indeed! But it does not change the fact that the food she's going to need to be a queen (let alone an optimally nourished queen) has to be stuffed into that cell in the tiny, pre-capping window. 

In David LaFerney's excellent "Beginner to Beginner Queen Rearing", he mentions that he got much bigger and better fed cells when he primed his cell builder colony with a frame of young, open brood 4 days before queen cell graft introduction, presumably because this gets all the nurse bees in max brood food production mode.

A small detail, one perhaps part of the "why all queens are not equal" conundrum. Small hives, with small forager forces (ie nucs), hives with disrupted age distributions (few nurse bees?), hives that are chronically undernourished: those will all struggle to produce top quality queens.

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