The bees were sure crowding into the upper box, which was not without bees to begin with. There are a couple of frames with emerging brood. Mel has offered a frame of eggs on Sunday, so we will graft about 20 cups and stick them into the upper box. There is syrup and a protein patty on the hive, just to keep everyone well supplied. For the cups, I, for the first time, dipped the cups into molten wax up to the lip and then pushed them into the bar. I will also give a few some royal jelly substitute, which I understand to be 1:1 plain yogurt and water. We have some new and some previously used cups, let’s see if that makes a difference.

Big day is tomorrow.

Tuesday afternoon, Liz will remove the cloak slider and then the bees will be re-united with the queen pheromone. Theoretically, that should put them from a swarming impulse to a supersedure impulse. And should get the bees to keep feeding the limited number of cells with copious amounts of royal jelly. Remember, they have very little other open brood to care for by that time, as most is capped over by then. They also should make nice long queen cells, utilizing the extra wax that they were supplied with. Let’s hope they all read that book too.

Best case: many big, well fed queen cells

Worst case: many big well fed queen cells torn down after removal of the cloak board.

If anyone is available to help Liz on Tuesday, that would be nice. If you lift the feeder and peek into the hive to check the queen cell bar, we at least know what we had, even if we have nothing left later. I am hoping on Todd for this. The task is simple: lift feeder off, lift  queen cup frame out, take picture, put back together gently. NO SMOKE. Smoke would be too disruptive.

Next sunday, it is time to harvest.

Today it was sunny (as opposed to the prediction for Thursday and Friday) so I started step 1: find the queen and confine her in the lower box. The queen in the hive is Cleopathra, from Mel’s lineage. She wintered fine, with fall feeding, has not been treated and has a 2 deep hive going strongly with brood. There are drones present and queen cups. No queen cells. Last year, she had a yellow mark. When I found her today, that mark was barely visible, so I gave her a bright green dot over top. She is now in the lower of the two deeps, with the queen excluder/cloakboard above her. She has a mix of open brood, capped brood and 2 completely empty combs in her box. This hive is being fed syrup and megabee patty, already for 2 weeks. The Cloakboard slider is out at this point, the hive is still one unit. In the upper box are young open brood, capped brood, 2 frames almost full of pollen, some capped honey from last year and an empty comb.
On top of that, the patty, and the feeder. The young brood in this box will be more than 3 days old by the time I will add grafted cells, this Sunday.
This is the plan (and I will need some helpers with this if you are interested):
Today is day -4: set up
Saturday: -1: insert the cloak slider and rotate the hive, open the cloak board entrance and close the original entrance (bring entrance reducer)
(AM)
Sunday (midday) Day 0: graft cell and bring to the hive. Insert bar with cells
Tuesday or Wednes day: Day 2 or 3: pull out cloak board slider to reunite the boxes
Add extra syrup and protein patty.
Monday (day 8): harvest cells into nucs?

What I have not decided is where to get the young larva from for grafting. What you you think. We do not have a lot of lineages left at this point. Mel’s line is very good I think, so we could graft from the lower box, from Cleopatra. Or the hive in my yard, also originally from Mel, but much bigger.

And I did not mention yet: the Q4 hive is at the Garst Farm, on Staufer road.