This is the third year of my adventures in beekeeping on the farm. It has been challenging, to say the least! Last year my bee buddy told me we were going to raise queens this year. I said “we?” You gotta mouse in your pocket? She laughed and told me one of her bee buddies had set her up with a frame, tool, and one of those magnifying visors and he wants her to start raising queens, so she sucked me into the adventure. Anything to learn about bees, I’m game.
She did all the prep work as far as putting nurse bees into a nuc the day before (queenless) with the brand new queen cups so they would clean the cups and get them ready for the larva to be inserted.
Now this isn’t going to mean much to folks who don’t know much about bees, but imagine taking a dental tool and removing a worm (that’s about 1/8 long) from a honeycomb cell and transferring it to another cell, placing it exactly in the center of the bottom AND making sure that you don’t injure it AND it has to be right side up. Bee eggs are laid in a little puddle of royal jelly so they breathe through the top part of their bodies so they have to be placed right side up and they aren’t marked!
Difficult, to say the least. My bee buddy wanted me to be “the eyes” of the operation (haha–she who has reading glasses laying in a trail behind her all over the place)
Anywho, we spent two days grafting eggs……
Not two full days, just larva-transferring operations on two different days.
I eat and write with my left hand but sew, use scissors, and everything else with my right hand. When confronted with a new task it takes me a few minutes to decide which hand to use. She also had about 4 different kinds of grafting tools to try out. I decided that I don’t do this well with either hand!
From the first batch of 23 cups we got 10 that the bees actually started working on. The second batch of 30 we only got about 6 that the bees accepted. THEN the nights got cold and the bees decided to cluster to keep warm rather than work on the queen cups. She texted me and said we might get 5 out of both frames.
Oh well, we got some practice and will try again when the nights are above 50. It’s an adventure!
If you are a bee-type person and want to see the YouTube video that inspired this operation, here it is:
Wild Things Farm 
