Grafting is a matter of practice and figuring out what you as an individual need to do to allow you to pick up larva.  The first time I tried to graft I was convinced after a half hour that I would never figure out how to do it.  So, that evening I thought about what was going wrong.  I had killed a bunch of larva and not picked up one cleanly enough to even consider using it.  I decided I needed to figure out how to negate my essential tremor.  That means taking all stress off my arms and wrists.  Solution - I simply lay a hunk of 1 inch board on top of the comb large enough I can rest the little finger side of my palm on the board.  Comb is surprisingly strong and bears the weight just fine if the board is roughly 4x6 inches.  Now I only need to deal with shaky fingers.  Well, that is a problem.  I can no longer write cursive and be able to read it.  My typing skill are horrid due to hitting the wrong letters 10% of the time.  On a bad day the solution is to self medicate by drinking a half can of beer or so and waiting ten minutes.  On a good day I am good to go without the beer.  So day two I practice killing larva again.  A bit better but still horrid.  I did manage to transfer a couple of larva in a half hour.  About day four I tried knocking down cell walls so I could see what I was doing.  About day six I started trying a drinking straw sliced off so the end of the straw was a narrow V shape.  I found ideally the end of the V needed to be square about 1 mm wide.  About that time I was picking up half the larva I tried for.  Getting them in the JZBZ cups was horrid.  It is impossible for me to hold  the cup in one hand and tool in the other and transfer.  So I made a jig to guide the grafting tool down the side of the cup so I did not need to hold the cup at all.  I started to get half decent picking up larva and transferring them.  I could do a larva per two or three minutes and only killed two out of three.

After a few hundred trials I got to the point I could pick them up most days without knocking down cell walls.  Last summer at the end I was moving a larva in under a minute.  So to graft 15 cells I only had the frame of brood out of the hive for 30 or so minutes which is no problem at all.  I have checked those frames the next day and seen no damage to ungrafted larva at all.  I also found out that if they were real hard to pick up a gentle mist of tap water from a spray bottle helped a lot.  Just enough mist to moisten the food slightly and make it less sticky.  Those larva are a lot tougher than you think.  I know of experiments where fresh grafts were shipped by UPS over night wrapped in a damp towel and some larva not only survived but made queens we would all love to have.  One such queen made nearly 400 pounds of honey as a one year old.

I have taught a bunch of people to graft.  My 12 year old grand daughter picked up the very first larva she tried with cell walls knocked down.  My son took a couple of tries.  I have never taught anyone that was a bad at it as I was at the start.  Yet, now I consider grafting the easiest part of raising queens.  The hard part is getting cell builders to accept them and to get them mated.  I have found reluctant cell builders can be cured as long as they are queenless.  Simply give them 15 grafts on day one and look at the cells on day two.  If they are not feeding at least ten pitch all ten and give them 15 new ones.  Look at them after 24 hours and if they are not feeding at least ten pitch them and give them 15 new grafts.  Generally the third or fourth set will be beautiful.  It seems like sometimes the gals simply need to be trained.  Plus you get better with the daily practice.  Once you get half decent at grafting it is not much effort to do a new batch of 15.  And, doing a few every day is wonderful practice and the skills really come along fast.  It was a long time before I could pick them up with the Chinese tool and without knocking down cell walls.  Then last summer all of a sudden the Chinese tool worked fine for me with intact walls.

Grafting is no different from learning to throw free throws in basketball or throwing a baseball or rock.  Some people seem nearly born with those skills, yet practice will result in major improvements.  Others struggle but with practice can get decent.  I am pretty convinced anyone can learn to graft.  There is no magic.  It is just practice.  If you kill 1000 larva so what?  The queen will lay more eggs faster than you kill larva by a big margin.  The bees have no investment to amount to anything in those first day larva.

The one suggestion I would make is start out with over sized larva.  They are a lot easier to pick up and transfer.  Then just pitch them because you know they are not going to make good queens.  Do not even try to pick up tiny larva until you can pick up larger ones.  Althou I have seen many pick up right sized larva the first day.  So, judge how bad you are and progress at your own speed.

I am convinced anyone can learn the skill.  And once you are as good as terrible at it you do not need or probably even want the fancy non grafting kits as they are more trouble than simply grafting.

Randy likes a dark room and wears a head lamp.  I like a dark room and use a little LED flashlight to spot the larva I want to graft.  Once I spot the larva I do not need to see it to pick it up so the flashlight gets turned laid down while I keep my eyes on the top of the cell holding the larva.  If anything trying to watch the larva while picking it up causes much more trouble than it solves when the cell walls are intact.  With knocked down walls eye sight helps as you can wiggle the tool around a bit to get a better angle.

Believe me, if I can graft so can you.  It is all about practice and practice and practice and suddenly it becomes easy.  Now, I have watched videos of others grafting and they were so fast it blows my mind.  If you are making a thousand grafts fast is important.  But, if you are making ten or 20 fast is irrelevant.

Dick

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