# Creating Cell Starter Colony



## peggjam (Mar 4, 2005)

Have you looked for any hatched queen cells? You will have to look close because most have proably been torn down. From what you are saying, I would suspect there is a virgin queen in there somewhere.

When truely queenless, I have never had them fail to start cells. I have had them start cells with a virgin in the hive, and then had the virgin destroy my cells before. There are alot of behaviors you start to notice when you start raising queens, some of them go totally against what the "books" say, but I have seen them none the less.


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## stangardener (Mar 8, 2005)

i am not a veteran but i think that continueing to check for cells and adding eggs/just hatched larva is the thing to do. i had a similar experiance this year. i did not manage to remove all the eggs/young larva and while my introduced larva were rejected repeatedly cells kept popping up past the time i thought they should be all cleaned out. the bees made it clear they didn't want any introduced larva until all the original options were used up. it was good grafting practice though. i have a couple of swarm boxes and this experiance helps the case for trying them.


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## Joseph Clemens (Feb 12, 2005)

Huumm, swarm box, now that sounds like an excellent idea, I should give that a try.


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## peggjam (Mar 4, 2005)

stangardener said:


> i am not a veteran but i think that continueing to check for cells and adding eggs/just hatched larva is the thing to do. i had a similar experiance this year. i did not manage to remove all the eggs/young larva and while my introduced larva were rejected repeatedly cells kept popping up past the time i thought they should be all cleaned out. the bees made it clear they didn't want any introduced larva until all the original options were used up. it was good grafting practice though. i have a couple of swarm boxes and this experiance helps the case for trying them.


If they weren't accepting the larva, then you were grafting larva that were too old. I have never had them fail to start a cell when queenless from the grafts I placed in. They wouldn't accept all of them, but they always start most of them.


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## Joseph Clemens (Feb 12, 2005)

This morning I started a swarm box instead. It now seems that this queen cell starter colony is now beginning to make emergency queen cells, but only with their own larvae. I placed the frame of hatching breeder eggs into the swarm box and surrounded them with emerging brood, pollen, and honey. Once they start some cells I plan to move the frame back to the starter colony for finishing, but first I will destroy any cells they have made and at the same time I will try grafting again with other young breeder larvae.


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## Joseph Clemens (Feb 12, 2005)

*Making queens*

I apologize, I haven't had the time yet to explore all the queen rearing literature that is available (thanks Michael Bush and others), but I had a thought and am hoping someone more familiar with what is possible may be able to answer this question I have:

If I were to take the queen cells my cell starter hive is just beginning to make, and I remove the original larvae and replace it with a just hatched larvae of my own choosing, are the bees likely to accept this replacement?


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## peggjam (Mar 4, 2005)

This is called double grafting. I haven't heard that it improves the chances of acceptance or quality of queens resulting from it's use.

They will more than likely accept the larva you place into the cells, as long as they are of the right age.


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## stangardener (Mar 8, 2005)

i don't think the larva that joseph clemens is proposeing to remove are grafted larva. i think they are larva placed by the bees. so technicaly not double grafted. to remove the larva leaving as much milk as possible and replacing with the proper aged larva sounds like a resonable "experiment" to me. it might interfere with the bees feeding/building schedule though.
also every time your in that hive check for cells.


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## peggjam (Mar 4, 2005)

stangardener said:


> i don't think the larva that joseph clemens is proposeing to remove are grafted larva. i think they are larva placed by the bees. so technicaly not double grafted. to remove the larva leaving as much milk as possible and replacing with the proper aged larva sounds like a resonable "experiment" to me. it might interfere with the bees feeding/building schedule though.
> also every time your in that hive check for cells.


If you read the post he made before:

"Once they start some cells I plan to move the frame back to the starter colony for finishing, but first I will destroy any cells they have made and at the same time I will try grafting again with other young breeder larvae."

then it sounds like double grafting........but either way, it sounds doable, just not sure what the results would be.


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## tecumseh (Apr 26, 2005)

joseph sezs:
So I made up a bar with 10 beeswax queen cell cups (9mm diameter and 9mm deep) - I carefully dry grafted a just-hatched larva into each cup and promptly placed it between a frame of pollen and one of emerging brood. Upon checking it the next day I discovered that the bees had failed to initiate even one of the ten as a future queen.

tecumseh replies:
if you are using some kind of wax cell cup you need to place these in a very active hive and have them polished prior to attempting anykind of grafting.

then joseph sezs:
Two days later, I checked them to see if they had started queen cells -- found no emergency queen cells anywhere in the hive.

tecumseh adds:
at this point in time you may have had some larvae cell being opened up but they are not so obvious at this point in time.

joseph then reports:
This morning I started a swarm box instead. It now seems that this queen cell starter colony is now beginning to make emergency queen cells, but only with their own larvae.

tecumseh replies:
sometime I simply harvest the royal jelly from these wild cups (remove the larvae first, the top of an old film cannister works for me), add a drop of water and use this to prime the cell cups (it just takes a speck) before grafting... plus priming makes the larvae come off easily. this alone, with the added step of polishing the cell cups, should greatly inhance your percentages.

good luck...


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## Joseph Clemens (Feb 12, 2005)

The swarm box has now produced some queen cell cups on the frame of emerging brood I provided them from their parent hive (not viable queen cells), but seem reluctant to produce E.Q.C.'s from my breeder brood comb of hatching eggs. They haven't formed any queen cells of any kind on this comb, though they are nurturing the larvae as they hatch. Very curious.

Meanwhile back at the cell starter colony: Well, I began the process. I found the first comb with well spaced queen cells, approximately 5 on each side of the comb. I carefully removed the larvae that were there, floating on their royal jelly. These were E.Q.C.'s (emergency queen cells), containing larvae from their original queen. I carefully grafted in, just hatched larvae from my breeder queen. Tomorrow I will see if they are still live queen cells, or abandoned queen cell cups, I will also search for another similar comb where I can repeat the process, also any other queen cells so I can be sure to destroy them.

tecumseh - I will save the royal jelly from any queen cells I destroy and use some as you describe to practice grafting into homemade queen cell cups. I need to keep practicing until I have at least some accepted.


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## Joseph Clemens (Feb 12, 2005)

Okay, I checked on the substituted larvae, all but 2 of them were accepted and continue to be cared for - yeah! Those two larvae might have been injured in my clumsy transfer efforts.

I went through the hive and found three other live queen cells that I removed the larvae from and salvaged the royal jelly from. Later I will use some of the royal jelly as suggested to prime with and see if I can improve my grafting success.


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## tecumseh (Apr 26, 2005)

joseph replies:
I need to keep practicing until I have at least some accepted.

tecumseh responds:
there you go... 

most progress collectively or individually happens because we can accept a certain amount of failure and are still capable of picking ourselves up and moving forward... I suspect if you keep plunking away at the task at hand you will quite shortly discover that you are much better at the task than you ever would have imagined. 

although the wax cell cups need to be polished in an active (strong) hives I am told (don't use them myself) that the plastic cell cups need not be polished.

and good luck...


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## Joseph Clemens (Feb 12, 2005)

*Substitution seems to work well*

Making a strong colony queenless, then replacing the larvae in the queen cells they produce with larvae from my breeder colony has provided me with about ten nice looking queen cells. Reading Doolittle on Michael Bush's web site makes it clear that I am not the first beekeeper to try this method. 

Several were destroyed by the mating nucs I placed them in, but at least two have hatched and appear to be very nicely formed queens - tomorrow I plan to make another attempt to have man-made queen cell cups with grafted larvae accepted by my chosen queen cell starter colony. Wish me luck - I am determined to get better at doing this.


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