# Don't ever get to big for your britches or count your chickens before they hatch



## Matt903 (Apr 8, 2013)

First graft of the season, everything is prepared, cell stater is nice and strong, grafting frame and cells are good and polished, frame I am going to graft from has just the right age larva. All goes smooth, with 30 grafts, placed nice and safe in the starter. I pat myself on the back and begin to calcualte my profits from the 30 nucs I am going to sell. I take a quick peak 24 hours later, and it looks like they are off to a good start. Man I am a good beekeeper! Nothing to this grafting business! I come back the next day to put them in the finisher, and every cell is torn down. I begin to look close, and I see one of my best queens happily laying eggs in her new home, which just happens to be my cell stater. Yes I shook her in when making the stater. Back to square one. I believe the moral of this story is the post title.


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## virginiawolf (Feb 18, 2011)

I learned a trick to prevent that from an awesome beekeeper but I haven't actually tried it yet. You put a queen excluder over the top of the cell starter that you shake the bees into. Maybe this could be something that we can both try down the road. I am looking forward to grafting a few this year


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

I don't shake my bees. A great keeper will never shake his or her bees.
I make sure to find the good ole queen first and put her aside. And then make the
cell starter by combining 2 strong hives together. Thanks for posting so we all can learn from yours.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Nice post Matt, you told your story with flair. 

My old boss used to say you can't even count the honey in the tank, only count the money in the bank.

If you moved the queen out of the starter, time to do another graft would be right now. Just graft straight back into those cells and put back in the starter. Don't worry about the eggs they will not be hatched yet so the bees will care for your grafts.


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## Matt903 (Apr 8, 2013)

Thanks oldtimer. I did move her out of the starter. I will try and graft again today.


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## snl (Nov 20, 2009)

beepro said:


> I don't shake my bees. A great keeper will never shake his or her bees.


Huh?


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## McCoslin (Dec 4, 2013)

snl said:


> Huh?


Matt I could go on for pages, every time I get too big for my britches I inevitably get knocked down again. I have been doing reasonably well with grafting on the first three tries. The fourth, I go zero out of 12. I went to using nicot setup to graft into and I got zero. No idea why. No queen in my cell builder. I'm trying again tomorrow. I guess you just keeping trying! 

SNL..... Ditto that.


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## jwcarlson (Feb 14, 2014)

beepro said:


> I don't shake my bees. A great keeper will never shake his or her bees.
> I make sure to find the good ole queen first and put her aside. And then make the
> cell starter by combining 2 strong hives together. Thanks for posting so we all can learn from yours.


Does a great beekeeper chase mites off his bees with razor blades? In your opinion.


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## Colobee (May 15, 2014)

As is sometimes mentioned, just because you find one queen doesn't mean there isn't another... 

Most 2 queen hives I've come across have been "the one" that I would have selected as a breeder.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

I'm a bit surprised that a mated queen would attack a 48 hour qc. My experience is they don't pay a lot of attention to them until they are nearly mature.


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## Robbin (May 26, 2013)

Colobee said:


> As is sometimes mentioned, just because you find one queen doesn't mean there isn't another...
> 
> Most 2 queen hives I've come across have been "the one" that I would have selected as a breeder.


My two best queens EVER, were two queen hives.... Found them both, after having caught the queen, and went to split frames of brood and stumbled onto second queens....
Two average queens makes you think you have a real winner....


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## Matt903 (Apr 8, 2013)

jim lyon said:


> I'm a bit surprised that a mated queen would attack a 48 hour qc. My experience is they don't pay a lot of attention to them until they are nearly mature.


Jim, good point. Something else then? :scratch:


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

As I have read the laying queen is not aggressive toward the cells. It was the
workers that tore down these cells after they have built them. Because in a queen right
hive the workers don't normally make qcs except when they try to supersede or swarm.

Oh, don't get hang up on the razor blade and the mites in My Little Bee Experiment. Over the years I
have done many of them just not publish here yet. 
Whether or not catching the mites work I don't know. But it was fun seeing some mites that can ran off the
comb ~25 mph. This is how I learn when there is no mentor close by. Reading is fine but nothing beats an actual
hands on experiment to learn from. My hive is booming now with 2 deep of bees and 11 frames of
young larvae/eggs. This hive will explode soon on our Spring flow here. Funny that they barely made it during the cold winter months. Just 
thought to share my result after fixing the mites a bit. And the stationary OAV works too.


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## BigBlackBirds (Aug 26, 2011)

queen didn't touch cells, workers stopped building once settled down. thats my quess


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## BeeGhost (May 7, 2011)

beepro said:


> I don't shake my bees. A great keeper will never shake his or her bees.


Say what????? There are a lot of great to excellent beekeepers on here that do this beekeeping thing for a living and ALL of them shake frames of bees. 

I have yet to include the queen in a cell starter/finisher, but I just overlooked two queens when I made a bunch of splits intro 5 frame nucs!!! Put ripe cells in them all only to have 2 of them with the sides chewed out.........started pulling frames and sure enough, a couple of queenrite nucs!! 

Like the old saying goes , "Stuff Happens"...........the only thing that stops you from achieving success, is to stop trying!!! Goodluck on the next batch of cells, and yes, those nurse bees will be looking to off load royal jelly that is giving them a head ache and your fresh larva are just the ticket!!


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Matt903 said:


> Something else then? :scratch:


Matt, do your graft. Pretty sure it will work out this time, please report back.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

I'm sure he's working on it now, OT.
Looks like he already fixed the problem to start fresh again.
It is going to work. Should take a few days to finalize the result this time.


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## Matt903 (Apr 8, 2013)

You were right oldtimer, had 23 cells started this time. Looks like they are going to be ok, now that I got the queen out. Thanks.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Excellent. If you leave them in there till close to hatching, be sure to look over the other combs that could have had eggs laid, to remove any rogue queen cells, just to ensure nothing can affect your cells.


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

snl said:


> Huh?


What I thought too, Larry. Also thought, "You better not get around a whole bunch of commercial beekeepers and say that out loud."


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

BeeGhost said:


> Say what????? There are a lot of great to excellent beekeepers on here that do this beekeeping thing for a living and ALL of them shake frames of bees.


Don't tell beepro, wherever he got that name from I don't know, but I have seen queen rearers shake bees off of bars of queen cells. Young ones. Lots of things one can do when they know how.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

Oh no, a professional keeper will never ever shake the bees off too. They either use
a feather brush or a bee brush for that. I just follow the you tube green hive type vids
to learn from. I just handle them with extra care when transferring to the nucs. I may not
know much but has gotten consistent good quality queens from my grafts. As always still evolving and learning
from my set up.


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## Ian (Jan 16, 2003)

Shake Shake shake


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

Shake, shake, shake.


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## Colobee (May 15, 2014)

Brush, brush, brush...


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## Lauri (Feb 1, 2012)

Frames with delicate brood, you brush. Which are usually the ones with the youngest nurse bees.

Frames with bees and no brood or emerging brood, you can shake.
It's everything to do with what's _*in*_ the frames and really nothing to do with adhearing bees.

Use an empty hive body as a funnel


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## djjmc (Feb 6, 2015)

beepro-
Is English your second language? As I suspect you may have the definition of 'shake' mixed up with something else?? 
Shake doesn't mean 'kill'


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

Shake, shake, shake and all this time I've been thinking I was a professional beekeeper. . Of course there is shaking and then there is SHAKING. Cell raising is the only time of year we ever bother carrying a brush along and I typically use a gentle shake to remove 90% of the bees before using a brush to clean off the last few. If there is a flow on, though, you don't even want to shake a little bit or you are going to have a mess at the grafting table. What you don't want to do with open brood is to rap it sharply. To remove bees from cells, though it's strictly smoke then gently brush.


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## Hive Tool (Apr 16, 2015)

beepro said:


> ..... Funny that they barely made it during the cold winter months.


Im no bee expert but I know this... Sacramento California and Cold winter months don't go together. Your bees barely made it through Sacramento Cold winter? Gosh I hope my Iowa Bees know what to do when it hits -15 again this year?

My apologies for derailing. *shakes some bees to warm them up*


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## virginiawolf (Feb 18, 2011)

Lauri, what you showed in your picture is what I was trying to convey. I was told to put a queen excluder at the bottom of the empty box then shake some bees from frames into it. Incase there is a queen that gets accidentally shook into the cell builder the queen excluder will block her from getting in and killing the queen cells. I don't shake the frames with the queen cells but I will shake some frames of bees to get some bees off of them for the cell builder. I could see using a feather or a brush as well but we always shook them. That was how I was trained to do it. I never used the excluder but I could see using one to make sure that no queen got in if I was doing a major league cell builder for like a hundred cells or something.


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