Was looking to rearing Queens by using an apidea. However my plan was to use the apidea Queen laying grid then create a nuc and place the new larvae in a Queen rearing frame in the nuc.
How long should I leave the nuc Queenless before putting in the new larvae and also how many cells should I put on the rearing frame.
I would leave your nuc queenless for >2 hr I leave mine up to 24 hr. It's best if the nuc doesn't have any eggs/young larvae it can use to raise it's own queen cells! You'll get a better take. The number of queen's you can successfully rear from a nuc will depend on the size of the box and it's strength.
This years 2nd batch of mini nucs just made up with QC's from grafts.
4 days in the cool garage with x2 daily water spray
No such thing as an Apidea laying grid. Presume you mean Jenter or cupkit? How many queens do you want/need as the above is normally used to produce quite a few
I put breeder queen in cupkit queen box for a couple of days, use well populated queenless starter to get two frames each with 2 bars of 10 cells started (ie total 40 cells) and after a day or so transfer single bars of 10 cells into each of 4 Demaree tops (above queen right colonies) to get them finished (Alternativelhy I use a strong colony and cloake board to start and finish the cells) do the whole thing.When cels about 2 days before emergence I put them into Apideas each stocked with 300 mls of young bees about an hour beforehand to get them mated. Assume about 50% final success ie I expect to get 20 or more properly mated queens out of it. When I find sealed brood I introduce the queens to colonies to replace unsatisfactory queens. Meanwhile I am producing the next batch so that I have another set of Q cells to put into those apideas. Timing is everything.
If you are new to queen rearing I suggest you start with Miller frame method or Demaree.
