Dear David and all,

I am using a similar system than JENTER since 1 year now. The system I
use is of French origin and is called NICOH-system. There is not much
difference between the 2: besides differences in cup size, the biggest
one is the fact that for a JENTER system you need to let the bees build
comb on the plastic foundation. This is not the case with NICOH system.
In general I am very happy with the system and I prefer it above f.i.
grafting.
I came into contact with this system through a beekeeper who was using
both NICOH and JENTER systems. He was/is a commercial queenraiser.
I try to summarize the most important "tricks" he learned me:

1. Building comb on JENTER foundation plate: Brush some liquid wax on
the foundation with a paint brush prior to bringing it in a hive with a
lot of young bees. My tutor used a nuc with young bees in spring time.
I am located in Belgium - Europe. Ideal time to do this is beginning of
may.
You may feed the bees with 1:1 sugar sirop. 1 to 2 days later the comb
will be fully drawn out. In case of excessive feeding, sugar sirop may
be stored already in the comb and this you have to wash out with water.

2. Preparation. 1 week before queen rearing, you have to feed the colony
from which you want to rear. I use honey/water 1:1. I feed contineously
with a honey jar upside down on the hive. In the lid of the jar there
are 2 holes drilled of 2 mm diameter. This will give contineously
stimulation to the hive and the queen will be stimulated to lay eggs.

3. Day 0.
        Day 0 is the day that you hang the JENTER in the hive. Hang it
somewhere in the middle of the brood nest, with the queen locked in the
JENTER system. I always do this in the afthernoon. Continue stimulating
with honey/water as described in 2.

3. Day 1.
        At the evening of day 1, take out the jenter frame and check if
there are eggs in all cups. If Ok, take out the queen excluder part of
the frame and continue feeding. I did not yet experience the observation
that the queen did not lay eggs in the majority of the cups. If this
should be the case, consider the following:
A. I rear queens from an F0 breaderqueen. In order to expand her
lifetime, I keep her on a restricted broodnest. Resticting the broodnest
makes the queen more eager to lay in the jenter cups.
B. Seasonal influences. During May/june the queen is more eager to lay
then in July. In July, I could only manage to have 60 eggs or so on 110
cups.
C. Theoretically, the queen is caged in for more than 24 hrs (27 or
so).This is OK, you may expect that the queen will not lay eggs for the
first 6 hrs or so, meaning that all eggs are laid within less than 24
hrs interval.

4. Day 4.
        During the evening of Day 4 you have larvae of 1 day old, and
you can stop stimulation. If you are going to do several rounds of
queenbreeding from the same hive, one may continue stimulation during
the whole queenbreeding timeframe.

As I said, I am very much in favor of using this kind of non-grafting
techniques, but there is also 1 important disadvantage:
The cups out of a JENTER system were in the F0 hive for 4 days, meaning
they completely have the smell of that hive. If you bring these cups
into a hive with limited or no genetic simularities, It may happen that
the cups are not accepted by the foster hive. This is not the case when
you graft.

I hope this helps,

Erwin