# Advantage/ Disadvantages of hatching out in incubator



## Chef Isaac (Jul 26, 2004)

What is the advantages and disadvantages of letting queens cells hatch in an incubator? 

Sometimes I wonder if the queens that do not hatch out in mating nucs would hatch out in the incubator. 

any thoughts?


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## adamf (Jan 28, 2006)

Chef Isaac said:


> What is the advantages and disadvantages of letting queens cells hatch in an incubator?


Well sometimes we have to do this if we have mature cells hatching and
mating nucs not quite done yet. Or if we're going to inseminate virgins
and need to hold them for ~ 7 days. As long as there are attendants with
the virgin and ample source of food (candy or something similar) the
hatched virgins with attendants can remain healthy for at least eight days
if not longer. Of course your incubator needs to be at the proper humidity
and temp. We use 3-hole Benton cages for this.


Adam Finkelstein
www.vpqueenbees.com


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## HVH (Feb 20, 2008)

Personally, I like the incubator approach. I will continue to use the incubator until I prove to myself that the disadvantages out weigh the advantages. On day 10 I can go out to the apiary and grab the frame with queen cells and place them in the incubator in my garage. Since the incubator is so easy to access, I can look in and see how the queens are progressing and oftentimes observe them emerging. After 10 or so queens emerge I bring them to the kitchen table for marking. I repeat this until all of the fifty or so queens are marked. I have never had a queen take to flight within hours of emerging. So sitting down at the kitchen table I usually mark 10 to 20 queens at a time by hand with a small nail and some testors. If I then invert a JZ BZ cage over the queen as she crawls across my hand, she will usually crawl up to the bottom of the cage which gives enough time to snap the top closed. This is much better than handling a queen with wet paint. The cages are then taken back to the incubator after all the marking is completed. The emerged queens seem to feed themselves with fondant, but for some reason they seem to loose vigor after 24 to 48 hours. This is the critical time where I think they need some help from the nurse bees. If the queens are introduced to nucs and they are well attended, even after a week, they are extremely vigorous and somewhat irritated if they have not been release from their cage yet by the bees. This is the time where I seem to loose some of my queens. I will go through the apiary and find queens dead in their introduction cages. I don't think this has anything to do with the grafting, finishing or incubation because most of the queens are released and are laying within a couple of weeks. Some queens will still be alive in their cages with bees clinging to the cage. The only correlation I have noticed so far is that the nucs with dead queens in the cages appear to have lost their bees to neighboring nucs and they are otherwise unattended (even with a full frame of emerging brood). So my hypothesis is that the queens can feed a little on fondant in the absence of nurse bees but only on a limited basis. At some point they need other nutrients that are provided by the nurse bees. If they stay in the incubator too long then they don't get those nutrients. If they are unattended in the nuc, then they also don't get the needed nutrients. The part that I am unsure about, is - do the bees abandon a queen because their is something wrong with her, or are they simply more attracted to another queen or population of bees? If you start up four nucs in an arrangement of two on the bottom and two on top separated by a Snelgrove board, I have found most of the bees have traveled to one of the four nucs, and that nuc has the only live queen. So, did the bees leave, which resulted in the queens dying, or did the queens die, which caused the bees to leave. I actually think it is the former, because as you space the nucs farther apart from one another, the nucs seem to retain their bees and the queens seem to survive at a higher frequency. I also wonder if four nucs were made up from four hives, would the bees be more likely to stay with their own scent and not move to the other neighboring nucs than if the nucs were made from a single hive. 
I have a lot of work yet to do before I can achieve a level of success that I am happy with but I plan on continuing with the incubator because I simply do not have the time to find the queen in all of the nucs with eggs/larvae and trap and mark the queen. It would take me much of a day to go through 50 nucs and mark the queens. Regarding Chef's question about the introduction of queen cells vs. virgin queens, I can say that some batches of queens do have a few that do not emerge from their cells and that; at least, these can be culled before hand if you use an incubator. I personally can't say from experience if cells are preferred by the bees. There was a time when I introduced cells and was not happy with my percentages back then either but I never ran a parallel experiment. 
My grafting technique has really improved to the point where I don't think my numbers will improve very much. I graft larvae that are less than or equal to 12 hours old and usually get about 90% of the cells drawn out. The resulting queens are very prolific and have been found in the apiary three years later with good laying patterns. I think any failures that I am currently experiencing will need to be explained based on post incubation phenomena. So, in summary, I am very pleased with the incubation of the queen cells but am not very happy about subsequent events. My best guess being that I am not making the nucs up in such a way as to optimized for the care of virgin queens. 
How I wish there was enough time to approach these questions systematically, but for now I will have to be content with rough observations that may turn out to be wrong.


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## Chef Isaac (Jul 26, 2004)

HVH:

Very interesting post. Thank you for your insight. 

when you take the cells out of the hive, you leave the adhering bees or not? I assume you brush them off. 

Do you have any problems of the queens hatching out and killing other cells before you mark them?


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## HVH (Feb 20, 2008)

Sorry for the lack of clarity. I brush off the adhering bees and place each cell into one of those hair curler cages. So each queen emerges in her own cage and cannot kill other queens. I usually place a small amount of fondant in all of the hair curler cages so queens emerging in the middle of the night can get a bit of food. If they emerge during the day, I will mark and transfer as described in my previous post.


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## adamf (Jan 28, 2006)

HVH said:


> SI usually place a small amount of fondant in all of the hair curler cages so queens emerging in the middle of the night can get a bit of food. If they emerge during the day, I will mark and transfer as described in my previous post.


We emerge virgins often in the incubator: always into a cage that has attendent bees. Usually 5 per virgin. I've found that the classic 3-hole Benton cages work better (more virgins alive after several days) then the hair curler cages. I have 50 that I'd be glad to sell!

Getting attendents into the cages is easy! Everyone has their own method. Here's ours: in a pinch, we'll make 4-5 lines of honey from a squeeze-container onto a flat plate or pan. Then a frame with young nurse bees or emerging bees is shaken onto the plate or pan. The bees queue up at the honey and are easily picked up and put into the cages with full honey stomaches! 


Adam Finkelstein
www.vpqueenbees.com


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## HVH (Feb 20, 2008)

adamf said:


> We emerge virgins often in the incubator: always into a cage that has attendant bees. Usually 5 per virgin. I've found that the classic 3-hole Benton cages work better (more virgins alive after several days) then the hair curler cages.
> Adam Finkelstein
> www.vpqueenbees.com


Thanks Adam,

I am beginning to think that my losses are from a lack of attendants. It makes sense that the queens can feed off the fondant when they emerge because it is easily witnessed. It is also apparent that they begin to loose steam after 24 to 48 hours if left without attendants (either in an incubator or in a hive). So my guess is that they aren't getting the nutrients (proteins/secretions) that they need. Even if a queen starts to run out of gas, I have noticed that she will become quite perky if attended to and stay that way as long as bees are taking care of her. I have read that the virgin queen is not very attractive to the bees. Maybe in some nucs, where resources are minimal and a lot of open brood is present, the nurse bees may be more attracted to brood and leave the queen unattended. 

When you say "(more virgins alive after several days)", what kind of losses do you experience?


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## Chef Isaac (Jul 26, 2004)

Ok, so let me get this straight... you pull the cells from the cell builder that are capped. Place them with the adhering bees into a incubator. I assume the incubator is closed off so nothing can get in our out, right? I am just not understanding that the cells go into the incubator with adhering bees with no way out. Am I missing something?


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## Chef Isaac (Jul 26, 2004)

Adam: I just reread your post for clarity. Thank you. 

Why more loss with haircurler?


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## Chef Isaac (Jul 26, 2004)

Adam: But what advantage do you find with leting the virgins hatch out in an incubator versus right in the mating nuc? All I can see is for the surity that the virgin will actually hatch versus a dude. Any thoughts?


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## HVH (Feb 20, 2008)

Chef Isaac said:


> Ok, so let me get this straight... you pull the cells from the cell builder that are capped. Place them with the adhering bees into a incubator. I assume the incubator is closed off so nothing can get in our out, right? I am just not understanding that the cells go into the incubator with adhering bees with no way out. Am I missing something?


Chef,

I'm not sure who you are referencing. As for me, I brush the bees off in the apiary and then transfer the cells to curler cages and then into the incubator. This part of the process is great. After they emerge things seem to go downhill without attendants. Adam was describing a neat method to get attendants into his cages. Adam's comments (and others) along with observations made in the apiary have convinced me that I need to test whether the lack of attendants has been my downfall. Don't get me wrong, I have made 90 nucs this season with a fair amount of success and plan on making another 60, but I have lost more queens than I would like and feel a need to discover the cause.
I will make a bar to receive either the JZ BZ cages or the curler cages and bank 1/2 of the queens in the finishing colony that I removed them from and treat the other half as usual. If the banked queens stay vigorous and losses are lower then I think I will get my answer. I just purchased some of those cheap JZ BZ battery boxes. One additional step will be to add the banked queens to a battery box while I am making up nucs. I am hoping that adding caged queens to the batteries full of nurse bees will keep them in better shape prior to making up all the nucs and after removing from the finishing colony. In any case, my goal now is to reduce the amount of time the queens are unattended prior to making up the nucs. Also, I have some good preliminary evidence that one can release virgins into the nucs if the nucs have been queenless. Since I am not 100% convinced of this, much time will be needed to be certain. Again, I will need to set up a controlled experiment where half of the queens are released among the bees and the other half introduced in cages. I hope to have some answers before the end of this season. 

Chris


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## adamf (Jan 28, 2006)

Chef Isaac said:


> But what advantage do you find with leting the virgins hatch out in an incubator versus right in the mating nuc? All I can see is for the surity that the virgin will actually hatch versus a dude. Any thoughts?


Hello! We will often hatch out virgins in an incubator because we don't
have enough empty spots in mating nucs. Or, we're going to inseminate the
virgins using II and keeping the virgins in an incubator with attendants is
much more efficient than keeping each virgin in a nuc where they have to be
caught an collected before II. If you hatch out virgins, you can also
perform morphological selection on the run: like using only the dark
virgins, or the virgins with the longest legs.

I tried hair curlers this season with attendants and their survival rate
was 50% less then in standard 3-hole cages. Both had the same # of
attendants (5) and queen cage candy. I'm not sure why this happened.

Virgins need to be touched by workers to survive. Sometimes people will
ship virgins in a battery box to us. They are usually almost always all
dead on arrival. Shipping virgins with attendants, the survivability
percentage is equivalent to shipping normal queens.

Virgin _Apis mellifera_ queen behavior and biology is really fascinating!

Adam Finkelstein

www.vpqueenbees.com


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## Chef Isaac (Jul 26, 2004)

adam: Check your PMS


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>What is the advantages and disadvantages of letting queens cells hatch in an incubator? 

Two, that I can think of. One is that you don't need as many resources as you don't need a cell finisher. The other is a place to put them when you just don't have enough nucs and you want to keep them handy intead of leaving them in the finisher with hair curlers on.


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