So I promised myself following the course that I would use the information and get started. Finally, on Saturday, May 22, almost a month following the course (where did the time go) Mike and I examined the hives for possible good environments for our foray into queen rearing. We found two hives that we deemed suitable and one of these was ideal with at least 6 frames full of bees and lots of new brood, in both boxes. We found the existing queens, marked them, and then put queen excluders in to isolate the queen in one box, to create the queen right hive. We didn’t get out to the hives again until two days later – Victoria Day, May 24th. Steve & Laurie joined us and Laurie and I began to make queen cups while Mike & Steve worked with the queen rearing frames. I remembered that we had to soak our queen cup molds AFTER we got them stuck up with beeswax the first time and the cups wouldn’t release. Oh joy and what a chore to get back on track. We won’t forget that again…!! A job that should have taken about one hour turned into a 3 hours extravaganza as we scraped off the wax, soaked the queen cup wooden molds and got the frames with cups ready for grafting. Then we decided to graft day old larvae in the field near the hives. But the time we got out there it was about 6:00 p.m. and starting to get a bit cool. Laurie and I set up table, chairs, grafting equipment while Mike & Steve went to the hives to select frames from which we were to select our candidates for grafting. The bees were not happy and it took longer than we thought. We were trying to squeeze in the grafting before it got too late, but everything we did took waaaaaayyyyy longer than we had planned. Finally a frame with grafting candidates came our way with a few bees swooping down. I had neglected to bring my veil or bee suit out to the field…brave old me…but when the bees started to go after my head… I did loose it. Laurie had 20 month grandbaby Sophie out in the field with us and she told her grandbaby I was just a crazy lady…as I dodged the bee attacks to my head… What a scene. Thank goodness no one took any pictures. It took quite a while to find good grafting candidates and I had a magnifying glass that was scratched beyond fuzzy, but finally my eyes adapted and I found sufficient #’s to graft into the 2 bars of queen cups that I had produced. Laurie did a few and then Steve took over to complete their 2 bars of queen cells. Because our frames were a bit different, their queen cells went into one hive and ours went into the other. We then packed up, returned to the barn and did up queen cells for future use so that we can graft every week. My theory is that this is a skill and we need to work on it regularly. We started about 1:00 and at about 9:00 we finally got into the house for dinner. It was an exhausting and humiliating experience and I reallllllyyyy hope that I get better at this fast.
Mike & I agreed to check the hives in a few days to see how they are doing. I printed off a blank calendar for May, June & July, so I can keep good records as we do our weekly grafting and monitoring of the stock. I have great respect for those who do this with success and particularly those who do any volume. We also put our genter kit with a potential for 99 new queens, into the hive so the bees could build up the comb. We are going to get the genter kit going as well as the grafting. Would love to hear from anyone else who can remember being fledgling rearer of the mighty queens and any advice they have. Cheers for now.
