Late Season Grafting

I have always completed any queen rearing by the end of July when there are plenty of drones. However this year a few grafting rounds failed to either produce enough sealed queen cells (the bees would start them only to take them down, ever so frustrating!) or the queens failed to get mated. This has been a bad year for getting queens mated, I have had more drone layers this year than at any other. No idea why!

By now the weather had turned colder, the flow had all but finished but I decided to have one last round of grafting.

I had chosen another colony to use as as a cell raiser. It was very strong, on double brood and had three supers full of bees. I had prepared the cell builder in the usual way, ensuring that the hive was packed with bees, many of which were nurse bees.

Grafts were introduced to the desperately queen-less cell raiser. Checked a couple of days later there appeared to be eight takes from the ten offered. Not bad.

8/10 takes?

The queen cell were introduced to nucs as normal, There were actually seven ripe queen cells seven nucs in total and so seven potential new queens.

I checked for emergence a few days later and found these emerged queen cells:

Empty queen cells

I posted this picture on Facebook on 23rd August and had a number of comments and pms saying that they (queens) wouldn't get mated as all the drones had been kicked out and it was too cold.

It was true most colonies had got rid of their drones but I had a few colonies that were queen-less due to late failed supecedures and some failed mating nucs, these had a few drones still active. I recall reading somewhere that this is a good way to carry out selective breeding, remove queens and feed selected drone colonies at this time of year and these drones will dominated the local population. I did however think that maybe this exercise  was doomed to failure!

Well did it work?

Yes it did! Six out of seven nucs have mated queens that were laying well and adding to their colony numbers. I had deliberately made up strong nucleus colonies to defend against wasps, they all received frames of stores and were fed too.

I have already given one colony away to a beekeeper friend that had lost a queen, the others are looking good going into winter.

I'll do this again next year, putting more effort into stimulating drone production in some colonies that have desirable characteristics.