--- On Wed, 2/22/12, kirk jones <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: kirk jones <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Queen cells and their contents
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Wednesday, February 22, 2012, 8:31 AM

We raise many queen cells every year for our splits in Florida to send back to Michigan after they make some honey in the south. 

The incubator temp is crucial in cell storage and impending hatching. We tweak the temps to slow down the hatch time, ie.  setting the temp to 90 or 91 to delay hatching. I like to run ours at about 92 to 93 degrees. It just works best for us. I just found a new thermostat that is digital for our newest incubator that I made up, perhaps my 5th one. It's the Ranco
digital that runs on line voltage. I discovered them when I set up our new winery/meadery in the catalogs for the glycol chiller control. You can set the differential to 1 degree and set it or F or C. in less than a minute. 

I can tell you this in regards
 to genetics and hatching time (a short story thats funny now). 
A neighbor beekeeper brought us his best queen to graft off of for his cells. So we grafted with his queen and also with larvae from a few of ours. When he came to get his cells in the morning, his were running all over the incubator and ours were still tight. I think it was part Russian stock, if my memory serves me well.  What a difference. 

I do think the royal jelly does dry up a bit by the time they hatch. I'll look closer this year. 
When we see a big plug of white jelly at candling time(just look at the cells with a strong light behind them to inspect the shadows of queens), they are usually duds, probably fell off the jelly. 

I just made up a new youtube a couple days ago for our web site as we were looking over our breeder picks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuOBoXvHamI  It's more for the
 layperson than a bunch of crusty old beekeepers. 

I started with 8 and now I'm down to 5. Just yesterday when I went through to check the mite loads(most 0 or 1 in ether roll) I found one breeder hive with some apparent virus expressed as dead workers that died just before hatching with undersized development and they were somewhat pissy to boot. That one is out of the lineup now. 

Just made up a few hundred nucs with laying queens we ordered from Hawaii in late January.  The bees were pretty strong so we knocked them down and still have time to build them back up for split again with cells in another 10 days. I made a little youtube for our blog for the layperson.  http://youtu.be/IAf5Zt0YWAQ

Tomorrow we do our first big graft for splits. We are planning to graft Tuesdays and Thursdays so we have weekends off. 
 

Kirk Jones

Sleeping Bear Farms   beekeepers making honey...
St. Ambrose Meadery/Winery- sister business of Sleeping Bear
Benzie Playboys           cajun and zydeco band........
Beekeeping Journal Blog   thoughts on beekeeping
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