Hi all

My queen rearing program has been held up a little due to unseasonal
weather, but I had to do the first stage sort out today. A friend of mine is
putting a one year old breeder queen in the post, so I needed a queenless
nuc to take it on it's arrival.

I will be using a method of introduction that I have not tried before... The
Steve Taber/Albert Knight/John Dews method that you can read about on
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman/queenintro.html
This is a lengthy document and the required info is near the bottom of the
'page'. There are no recorded instances of this introduction method failing.

I opened up and found that the bees were actually covering 19 frames so I
pinched two that had mainly sealed brood with a few open larvae, I placed
these in a 5 frame nuc box and put in a frame feeder of syrup and a couple
of drawn combs. It should be OK until tomorrow when the post arrives.

But back to the main reason for this text...
I shifted the hive onto a spare stand alongside the original, I put a fresh
floor on the original stand with it's closed entrance facing the oposite
direction (a hinged flap closed by a wingnut in my case).
A clean brood box on the floor and a frame feeder of syrup at the extreme
right and extreme left of the box (the original text calls for a top feeder
but I had the frame feeders to hand). then a sort through the frames placing
mainly sealed brood in the bottom box.

when this box was full I put on the Cloake board, with it's entrance facing
the same way as tho original one did, and then placed another box on that .
I placed the grafting frame in the middle of this box and filled it up with
frames. Finally a roof ( no coverboard or inner cover in my case, as my
roofs are solid, insulated, non ventillated ones).

Normally I would ensure that the queen was in the bottom box but as the hive
had been originally assembled in a hurry (when the bees were smashed up in
January) there was much scraping and chopping to do as much brace comb had
been built, thus queen finding was less important that correcting some of
the mess.

I shall be going to the apiary when the breeder queen arrives and will do a
bit more sorting and scraping, I will also put the queen "downstairs" at
that time.

There was a dummy board among the 22 frames so this was left out to form the
gap for the grafting frame to be "aclimatised".

The next stage will be "Grafting day" that depends how the weather is,
anything from four to ten days time. Grafting day fixes the rest of the
timetable.


Regards From:- Dave Cushman, G8MZY
Beekeeping and Bee Breeding, http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman
IBList Archives, http://website.lineone.net/~d.cushman