Haven't been around for a while as I'm flat out studying for my Cert in Beekeeping, which finishes in a month and a half, but meantime it's spring here in New Zealand and the girls have also been demanding a good bit of attention.
Sunday a bit over a week ago I grafted 15 queen cells, at least 10 of which have been accepted. Tomorrow (Wednesday) I'll be making up nucs out of our two home hives for these cells to go into.
Some questions please to ease my nerves and help me get through this as smoothly as possible:
1 - Have I got my day right - If the grafts were done Sunday, is Wednesday the right day to nuc em? I guess the question is if I'm counting ten days from grafting, is the grafting day 0 or day 1?
2 - Should I make up the nucs in advance of putting the cells in at all? If needs be, I could make up nucs this afternoon, which would give them 24 hours queenless before the cells go in? Or am I best to just bung em all in at once?
3 - should I close up the nuc and block the girls in for a while after making them up? If so, for how long? Theyre going into 3/4 depth four frame nucs, pine construction with the typical nuc round entry hole. Temperatures here are expected to hit 22C tomorrow - about 72F, and I'll be making up the nucs around 3-4 in the afternoon.
4 - positioning of hives/nucs. I can't move the nucs off site until the weekend. They have to stay in the yard for four days after they are made up. I'm worried about all the girls abandoning the nuc to go back to their original hive. I'm thinking perhaps I should move the main hive (it will be reduced from five high down to one or two boxes high once I'm done) about ten feet away and sort of stack the nucs where the hive was originally to encourage foragers to settle in the nucs. I think the 'glue' of having the queen with some brood in the original hive should see that hive alright, or should I worry about that depopulating as well?
5 - The nucs will be made up with one frame of honey, one of capped brood, one open brood and one of honey. If I'm short of brood, which do I sacrifice including for right now - the capped or the open? I can supplement with a frame of brood from the new site on the weekend, but it might be tight tomorrow.
NB - the hive I'm primarily making the nucs up out of is not the hive that has bred the queen cells - I have two in the backyard, so the nuc-making hive is bursting strong and hasn't been weakened by the effort of queen production so far.
Anyways, really appreciate any suggestions you might have. Very excited for this to go as well as possible.