June 17th – decided that although it is late in the season I wanted to raise some queens to replace the poor performing ones and to create a new Nuc from a split. Will be grafting and using a Cloake board with my strongest colony, Emerald, as the cell raiser and finisher which is on  16 frames of brood. The second strongest colony, Denim, looks to be a real strong honey producer and will use that as the source for the grafts.

Requirements:

Double brood – top box is cell starter & bottom box is queen right, combined becomes cell finisher
Organise frames – capped brood and pollen in top box. Open brood and stores in bottom box.
Get very full pollen frames, including trapping pollen if necessary
Make up cell cup frame – 12-16 cells
Use Cloake board with entrance block
Lots of nurse bees in cell starter – shake in from bottom box.
Create flow conditions, feed with syrup if necessary
Pollen frames for nurse bees to use
No queen cells – check cell raiser before introducing cell cup frame
Acclimatise cell cup frame 1 day before grafting (Same if using Nicot frame).

Timetable – starts 17th June
Day 0 – put in Cloake board (slide out, entrance closed), and insert cell cup frame.
Day 1 – find queen and cage – she will go into bottom box after reorganising frames
Day 1 – move capped brood frames into top box, keep one uncapped frame to attract nurse bees
Day 1 – shake nurse bees from bottom box into top box and from other colonies if necessary
Day 1 – insert Cloake board slide, opening entrance and put in ramp for foragers using old entrance. Reverse floor and open up rear entrance if possible
Day 1 pm – graft larvae from donor colony and place frame back in top box with pollen frames either side
Day 3 – remove Cloake slide as queen cells will have been started
Day 7 – make up Apideas, nucs etc to receive QCs
Day 10 – transfer queen cells to other colonies