Ghislain> Does this not exist in the USA?

https://www.blueskybeesupply.com/complete-jenter-kit-330


Yes , and last year I experimented with how to use one for the first time and discovered a few things. I got on to it because of a study I read earlier this year about queen quality and egg size. With one of these boxes, you can graft eggs directly into a stater and you can go so far as to select the egg size you want to graft. With the right queen and workers, I would get many graft worthy eggs in 24 hours. Some colonies would eat back most of the eggs and others would leave doubles in cells with one damaged. If I tried using those queens the grafts were mostly rejected in the starter.  So for me, it was mostly about finding a queen and worker combination that cooperated with the system. I was just working out the procedure so I only mated out a few queens - they were fine. This year I hope to go full cycle and do some field evaluation of egg grafting versus larva. I never let the eggs in the box go to larva so maybe others can comment about how that works and the timing involved. 

One cautionary note is that a queen in full egg-laying mode that's caged even for hours will surprise you how fast she becomes flight-ready. I lost a great queen transferring her back to the colony. 



Bill Hesbach
Cheshire CT

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