Saving Queen Cells

[Sung Lee]

After Dr. David Tarpy's talk through zoom on Tuesday I learned a couple of things very important on queen rearing. This is not queen grafting situation. 

When i harvest queen cells I always collected ones capped first and tend to leave behind uncapped cells. Ones capped early are the ones older larves that will emerge around 10 to12 days. And one of them will kill others that properly aged larve or egg were made to queen cells which will emerge in 15th to 16th day. These are more desirable queens to be. Unfortunately these were left get killed. Dr. Tarpy was insisted on 5th day. Meaning at 5th day go in eliminate ones capped cells on 5th day. These are older larves used. This is big game changers. 

Also fresher the comb help to make more cells were made. 

First batch of queen cells were placed

Cells were carved out and placed in roller cage with clips.

They are emerging that first three went into mating nucs yesterday. 

Other set is from feral(?) bees living in the structure and out growing to outside under the eave. They have been there over 2 years. In May they swarmed and I collected. Now they are superseding. Again I collected extra queen cells. They will be soon emerge. One significant of this colony is they never been treated and still survived and thriving. Looking forward to see how they will do. 

Keep you posted 

Sung Lee The Bee Charmer 

[real...@aol.com]

Thank you Sung , we all look forward to your test to validate / invalidateb Dr Tarpy presentation .

Sent from the all new AOL app for iOS

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[Robin Chatham]

Thank you Sung. I learned a couple things too. 

The bigger/rounder the queen the better, studies showed more viable egg production. 

Also, to explain the 5 day capped queen cell event Dr. Tarpsy described a bit differently:

 

We are talking about Intercaste or Scrub Queen...

All fertilized larva destined to become female are fed Royal Jelly for 2.5 days. 

Those to become workers then get fed a different recipe of Jelly that inhibits full reproductive-gland development.  

The 2.5 day old larva destined to become a queen continues to get Royal Jelly the rest of her 8 day larva phase and develops full reproducion glands.

Heres where it gets interesting...

Let's say you've identified a hive is queenless and without wet brood. You give that hive a frame of wet larvae which includes eggs. 

Precisely 5 days later you check for queen cells.

The queen cells that are already capped have 8 day old larva in them and therefore had to have been made from a 3 day old larva or even older larva which means that larva probably was fed the second stage of Jelly while in the donor hive then back to ROYAL Jelly when it was installed into queenless hive. 

Queen bee larva fed ANY amount of regular Jelly will be forever changed physically and become an inferior queen. 

The longer a larva gets regular Jelly before being switched back to Royal Jelly the more underdeveloped and deformed she becomes as a queen. 

The same can be true when grafting.  If we graft a 3 day or older larva and the queen making  colony makes a queen from it, it'll become Intercaste.

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