Hello All,
First let me say we are talking about a commercial beekeeper not wanting to
pay $10  mated queen but rather a buck or two a piece for ripe queen
cells(or use cells made yourself in my case).

The beekeeper is wanting to control swarming, build up colonies *without*
losing the 15 days talked about in this discussion AND end up with a *new*
queen going into the honey flow. The procedure is similar to a two queen
system which I have written about before on BEE-L.

The "cell" method many commercial beekeepers use is called requeening
without dequeening and works quite well.

A second cell method  is requeening by finding the queen but involves 40% of
extra labor( from tests run in New Zealand  on a large number of hives in
the 70's).

Both methods never lose a single day of queen not laying.

Caged queens do not work as well with the above systems.

The cells I use are raised by the Doolittle method with strong starter &
Finnish colonies. The queens I use for my cells  are II breeder queens of
the desired race and the drone source are the drones of the yard.One reason
why I do not mix my races in yards.  The cells are candled before
installation.

I buy caged mated queens for experiments I have written about. Queen cells
from queen breeders are impractical for me because of distance.

Commercial beekeepers only (for the most part) use cells they can drive a
short drive and PICK UP. Cells are the most common form of splitting and
requeening in many commercial circles.
Especially in South Texas in spring.

Less equipment and labor (eliminates the mating nuc).

If we did commercial beekeeping like the bee books said we would never get
the work done!

Bob

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