Grafting Italian and Carniolan queens in this episode and things go bad. But we pivot and turn a disaster into a success.
If your looking to get started you can start with a kit like these:
2nd Part of Grafting Italian and Carniolan Queens
Transcript-
So this is part two of three on grafting queens, it's been about 30 hours or so since I placed those frames in that stirred colony, so we're gonna dive in there, take a look and see how the development of these cells is gone right now I expect to see around the cup, the nurse bees and workers kind of starting to work around the cup and start forming the addition to the cup with their wax.
So I'm gonna dive in, it's right, that's the colony right there, I left those frames out. So the bees could clean them up. And I would just go to waste. Otherwise they sit to my garage and the bees find them. I come out and there's like 1000 bees in my garage.
It's a beautiful day, I think it's 83 or 84. It's not quite as humid as yesterday, but it's good to see it's just brilliantly sunny so and not too windy, which hopefully the bees will be nice. So let's jump into it.
It Goes Bad
Alright, so the start colony. bee population isn't huge in here. We don't want some additional bees in here off of a frame, which will give us hopefully mostly workers from one of our strong colonies. And we did that a day before putting those up EZBZ cups with on frames in here. So we'll open this up, see where it's at. We have a honey super area, we really don't need one right now.
The size is pretty low population wise. So we'll see all the skills I have bring a tool so hopefully this goes all right. So it can see none of the bees are on them. It looks like they might have started to work some. Looks like maybe they were starting to build them out but the cups are dry as can be. So it's likely we didn't do a good job of putting the starter colony together, which kind of sucks but, it is what it is. Same with this one. So I'm going to look around see if maybe they stole kind of some of the eggs from tried to put them in their own Queen cups.
Now see anything so what I'm gonna do with this one is I'm actually gonna hit the reset button. I'm just gonna have to put these frames back in here and then reset it. That's kind of a bummer. But it happens. So one of the things I may do is I've got two really strong hives. They're the ones I grafted out of and we do we manage varroa mite primarily through splits. Never used chemicals to today, not even once, for treating aroma, which we've had some large losses initially but A lot of the Queen's that we have now are a strong, they've made it through the winter, even without the treatment. So that's good. That's what we're trying to grow off of. I think I mentioned that in the first videos the Italian was one that made it through the winter and then we're switching over to carnies.
And so, we were using the carni stock that we really like. But what I'm gonna do is I'm going to pull those queens while I'll make another video about it, but ultimately, what we're doing is pulling the Queens out to give brood breaks in both hives and see put the queen in new equipment, so they have to draw the comb out, so on so forth, but yeah, I guess we'll take it from there. So it's a bummer sometimes it happens but I'm going to hit the reset button and you know, we'll get these queens going.
The Pivot
So Alright, so it's been two days since I restarted the Queen starter cells off of the grafting and those EZBZ cups. And I'm gonna dive in. So we want to dive in the hive here in just a few seconds, or a few moments here, but we ended up using this one which we split and this was our Italian that's pretty much our best performing at least here in our test yard. And we split it into if you can see it on screen here not but we split it into our nuke as part of our mite management strategy and that's to provide that brood break.
And so I thought it made sense that since we just pulled the Queen out of this one, mine is gonna throw the starter cells in there because they're going to recognize something's wrong and start raising queens on those EZBZ cups so hopefully it went good there started calling he did not go good as you just watched. So let's get into it. Well that's heavy, that's a deep I think for those are 70 pounds. You didn't close. Right, so the moment of truth. Oh yeah, look at that. So I've taken [number] 23 out of 33 so we have 10 that didn't take 23 it did. That's pretty good. With these back in there anyways so I would say that was really good. I'm gonna leave that in there called see I put it in there two days ago.
She's mad at you put that in the two days ago. And I like to pull it out within 10 days and it's split the cells up and either put them in mating nukes or put them in queenless hives, we've got five or six queenless hives and then we'll we're going to do his freedom either for raising nukes for next year, or at least raise some in nukes. For colonies for next year. All we're going to do is sell some of them which we'll do on kinnibees.com, which I'm not necessarily advertising. But that's our website. So I think that's good. So that concludes Part Two.
What we'll do is probably end up putting them in, I'll take a look in there, again, if they've got on that today, but in a few days, I'll look to see if they've raised there are drawn out there any old their own queen cells, that's the half, I'm going to get them out of there and put them in a finishing hive, which doesn't have any Queens or make one up, and then transfer them where they need to go. Yeah, so I'll likely I might have that in the next one. But that pretty much concludes part two of raising queens. I think it's fun. It's a way to be sustainable. And something that I think that everyone should give it a try. I mean, the kits are not all that expensive. And if you can graft two, three queens, or more than pays for that setup. So give it a try. And as always, please subscribe. It helps us get in front of more people with our information, which isn't always maybe the best way or the way for you to do it, but it's the way that we like to do it. And so yeah, thanks again. See you next time.