# How long can you confine queen on graftless system?



## Jean-Yves (Oct 27, 2010)

Hi, love your "thinking out of the box" been watching the photos the last 15 min. I am wondering if you could finish your project with some kind of Hopkin's system. Having the larvae growing in an horizontal position.....
Good luck and keep us inform.
THANKS


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## David LaFerney (Jan 14, 2009)

That's the plan. The JZBZ cups are just a slip fit in the queen cage - they should come right out. The plan is for the queen to lay in them, then remove the queen excluder - free the queen - leave everything else in place, and let the mother hive take care of them for 3 days until they hatch, then pull the plastic JZBZ cups out of the cage and put them into a regular cell bar frame (where they will hang vertically) and on into a cell builder hive.

This is the first time that I've had a weather forecast that had enough good weather in it to do all that.


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## frazzledfozzle (May 26, 2010)

sounds interesting!
I'm just thinking outloud and wondering about the cell size. Normally the queencell cup is worked into queencell size before the queen lays into it I'm wondering what will happen when these eggs hatch whether they will be regarded as regular brood or whether the cell will be reworked and treated as a queen.

It will be interesting to see what happens keep us posted.

frazz


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## David LaFerney (Jan 14, 2009)

Natural queen cups are already vertical which I suppose has something to do with it, but if the cell cups are larger than normal and horizontal I would think that the queen would lay drone eggs in them. I suspect that there is an ideal width and depth for getting the queen to lay worker eggs and then getting them raised into queens. I don't know what those numbers are though so I tried to make them as close as possible to regular worker brood.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

As to how long to leave the queen in, she could stay there for weeks and likely be fine, so the few days you are needing will not be an issue.


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## David LaFerney (Jan 14, 2009)

That makes sense alright - you can bank for weeks or months. I know one thing - I'm going to do something like you do to limit the queens movement within the hive. Finding a free roaming queen in a full sized hive full of bees takes too much time.


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## fafrd (Aug 22, 2009)

David LaFerney said:


> how long could you leave her in there without doing any harm?


Your interesting homemade job is pretty similar to the Nicot Cage that I use. I have had the most success leaving the queen in the cage until I graft which is usually 5 days after caging and have noticed no ill effects on the queen.

When I have released the queen immediately after eggs have been laid (1 or two days after caging) I have a signifcanly lower yield of larvae because the nurse bees clean out many of the eggs and back-fill the cells with nectar.

Leaving the queen in the cage until the larvae are ready for grafting I have a larvae in virtually every cell 

-fafrd


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## David LaFerney (Jan 14, 2009)

Thanks fafrd, that is extremely helpful, although I already released the queen after about 24 hours - I'm actually planning to move them to the cell starter today. If I see what you are describing at least I will know what to do next time. 

Thanks


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## Troy (Feb 9, 2006)

Queens can stay confined a long time. I once requeened a hive and put the queen cage in there and did not see the clear tape over the candy. Came back 2 weeks later and she was still in the cage and alive and well.

OOPS, shame on me - but 2 weeks and she was fine.


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## David LaFerney (Jan 14, 2009)

fafrd said:


> When I have released the queen immediately after eggs have been laid (1 or two days after caging) I have a signifcanly lower yield of larvae because the nurse bees clean out many of the eggs and back-fill the cells with nectar.
> -fafrd


And that is exactly what happened - so since the cell starter was all primed and ready I grafted instead. I'll try again in a few days.


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## lakebilly (Aug 3, 2009)

Dave, Love your pics. Can you show how the cups fit in the drilled board? More pics of you setup. Thx. Lb


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## David LaFerney (Jan 14, 2009)

I'll look and see if I have some clearer pictures. The JZBZ wide based cell cups are just a slip fit into the bars and the bars are a slip fit into the frame.

I haven't tried this again, but I probably will - I'm having pretty good success grafting on my first 2 attempts, and despite the pitfalls of grafting it doesn't involve the risky act of catching and confining your best queen.

That said, If I had known about these brown cell cups for the jenter system I would have used them instead of the JZBZ cups, because A) they are already the right size for the queen to lay fertilized eggs into B) Because they don't have a wide base, they can be left on the original bar until they are ready to plant into the mating nucs - the base on the JZBZ cups would prevent them from coming out of the hole once the cell is built.


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## Velbert (Mar 19, 2006)

When i did the nicot year before last I kept her in the grid about 2/3 months would add brood from a support nuc I was using a 1/2 length deep 5 frame nuc I would harvest my 15 - 40 cell cups from the grid and move the eggs to the outer edges and just put my new cups in the center for her to keep laying usually would get 20/25 average cups for using in the cell builder. some time i could graft every 2 to 4 days because the eggs that was moved to the outer edges was ready for graft in a day or two but you have to keep check every day to catch them when they hatch.

if using the jzsbzs cell cup for her to lay in they are a lot bigger than a worker cell she will more than likely lay a drone egg in them when she does lay any eggs.


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