reverse Doolittle double split

Being worthless in the desert

 Before I go on with day three, I should tell you how discouraging day two was.  Firstly, these two guys have been beekeeping together for the past 50 years, and when they do have to discuss something, they have their own little language for it.  Most of the time, though, they just know what each other is going to take care of, and they are a pretty self-sufficient pair.  So, I was just running stuff back and forth to the truck for them, and wishing I could do more, but it's fine...Then, one of the hives we had done ended up with the queen in the pile of bees in front of the hive.  Yonny spotted her, and since no one else was taking their glove off, I did, and tried to put her back in a couple of times.  She didn't want to go, and after watching, they say, "no, it's the next hive over".  Well, by then she was gone, no one knows where.  I'm sure she didn't go in the wrong hive, but who knows?  So, just to make a great impression, here I make a hive queenless...they were pretty gracious about it, after all, what we are here for is to make new queens.  We'd probably be looking for her to pinch her head in a couple of days anyway.  I still felt like an idiot, though. Plus, we took off a lot earlier than I was expecting that morning.    However,with the early start, I had forgotten to change out of my cute little town sandals.  So, there I was, wading around the bee yard, losing queens, with a pair of leather gloves on my feet.  I looked like an orangatan.Then that tough first grafting session really left me feeling like a force 3 disaster.
    Day three, though, was tons of fun!  Yonny decided to do the job a different way, which I hear is his modus operandi, never doing things the same way twice.  Here's the new way of making shakers and swarm boxes...and we could all work as a team.  We still dropped the hives on their fronts to start, and reversed bodies, but instead of looking through them, we just stacked them up and put a fume board on top.  
A fume board is just what it sounds like, a stinky board that smells like peach vomit.  It makes the bees leave home.  We left them alone until bees were hanging out the front and sides because home stinks so bad.  Then we placed a queen excluder between the two bodies, did a quick check for the queen in the top body, put a cover on, and left them over-night.  Fast!  We did 24 in two hours.  Home for lunch by 1.  
   After a nice little siesta, we went out to a different yard to look for the right size larvae to graft.  It is surprisingly hard to find a whole sheet of just what you are looking for, and we need six per day to graft 12 bars with 36 queens per bar.
Grafting went easier for me yesterday, with a different magnifier.  I did probably 8 or 10 while Yonny did all the rest.  We also found a swarm in the yard here at the house, africans for sure, we can't go outside without getting nailed.  It took three tries to get them to stay.  It was swarm catching with a fork lift, a first for me.
   Besides finding enough of the right size babies to graft, the whole thing is made harder by the fact that we can't keep hives of bees (except for this swarm for a couple of days) in  the yard where we live.  It is in town, and the people don't like having so many bees around.  So, we go to a yard about 5 miles a way with a cooler with hot, wet towels in it, and try to find 6 frames as fast as we can.  We then drive back to town with the frames in the cooler, staying humid and warm, bring them in the kitchen, and graft as quickly as possible.  As we go, we pack the grafts in another cooler with hot, wet towels, and then run them 7 or 8 miles out to our queen yard, where we make space and add them to our super-full swarm boxes (cell builders) which have frame feeders, too, as insurance.   Then back to where we got the donor frames from, and put them back where we found them.  It went much better today!  We'll see anyway, in a couple of days when we can find out how many were accepted.  
    One of the things we did this morning after driving through 15 or so bee yards looking for swarms, was to go back and count the accepted queen cells from the first day.  We had 103!  That is 47-57 per cell builder.  Yonny says that 60 is too many, so we are pretty happy.  I'm interested to see what the count is tomorrow, when more of them are mine...
   Tomorrow, I'll share the tips I have learned about grafting.  Thanks for reading!  T