Round two worked well too. 39 cells took out of 42 grafts. All look decent. Both my first and second graft in 2012 had better success than any grafts in previous years. Was it the change to plastic cups, years of practice, perfect weather, or just an exceptional cell building colony? There are lots of factors that influence the success of a queen graft. More is involved beyond being able to move worker larvae from its comb into an artificial queen cell cup. And much more is involved in getting these queen cells hatched out, mated, and laying in new colonies. Making splits, nucs, or colony divides is one of the prerequisites to rearing queens so that you can get those queens mated and heading new colonies.
I pulled this graft out of the builder at 5 days after grafting and moved them to the incubator. All cells were capped. I pulled my last batch at 4.5 days and I had a few cell still not finished. So waiting till 5 days after the graft is best. At the same time, I do the maintenance manipulation on the cell builder. I’ll talk about that later.
