Checking graft acceptance
This will be a quickie tonight, to hopefully keep these a bit shorter! (Yeah, right). I wanted to tell you exactly how we check our cell builders for graft acceptances. More than just checking our baby queens, we are also looking for wild queens that the hive may be growing. The bees often choose older larvae than we do, and so the wild queens they raise will emerge earlier and kill our grafts if we don't get them, or move our girls to an incubator, which I understand we will be doing here. We have been cutting out all the wild babies anyway. Then when we check our graft cups, of course the nurse bees are covering them very well, and you can't see how many took without moving the bees. It is very important not to touch that fragile new wax the bees are drawing into the queen cell! If you dent it, the baby is done for. So, just very carefully move the nurses. We did our usual moving cell builders and shaking shakers this morning, but then also did 20 or 30 splits (yours truly did about 4), so we didn't have time to check graft acceptances before coming home to do our last day of grafts. It was pretty hot this afternoon, too, so I feel a little like I got my butt kicked by two fast moving "old" guys. Yonny will check our grafts from Saturday and Sunday tomorrow, while I am out with the rest of the crew doing splits all day. I'll let you know! Thanks for reading. T
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