I checked the cell raisers → the original cell raiser had 27/30 takes, and the new cell raiser had 18/30 takes. I reached out to our NYC facility to see if they wanted locally reared queens, and they said yes.…

I checked the cell raisers; there are no takes in either of them. A mating queen got into one, and in the other a virgin queen was there and had destroyed the other developing cups. After finishing up with the…

After getting home from the apiary, we did our fifth graft. We made another cell raiser to try to combat the problem of mated queens getting in and destroying our developing queen cells; so we doubled the amount of cups…

We check in on the fourth graft; another mated queen got into our cell raiser! Outside forces were messing with the space the cell raiser was in and a mated queen got in. We went to visit the apiary; we…

Our May 28th (third) graft failed. There was a mated queen inside the cell raiser and she destroyed the developing queen cells. There was only one cell that survived, so we put that one into a mating nuc. At this…

We went and checked on the queens and added 12 more cells from the second graft to the cell raiser. The queens from the first graft weren’t mated yet due to bad weather, so we left them there to check…

Emily and I also both conducted another graft today, and we each had 80% take!

Today, we took the cups that are developing and put them into the incubator. Then we drove to our research apiary and checked on our mating nucs, to make sure they are queenless and can support the developing queen cells.…

After 48 hours, we had 28 takes → 73%, great outcome for our first real graft. We left them in the cell raiser until 8 days later.  

Since our first practice graft on April 3rd, we’ve been conducting practice grafts every Monday and Friday. Today was our first real grafting with putting the queens that developed into queenless nucs in our research apiary so they can go…