reverse Doolittle double split

 Making Queens, Big Time

So, here I am at a secret location in  the desert, (secret because we are the only people with bees here, and we don't need any competition for forage), learning to make queens with "Yonny", and "Domingo", two 73 year old beekeepers who look about 59, and who can move a whole lot faster than me.  Beekeeping must be really good for us.  This is day three for me.  Mostly I have felt like  a five year old who doesn't understand what all is going on around me, and doesn't really have all  the vocabulary I need, and I am an eleven year beekeeper. 
     The first day was our easiest.  We made 6 "swarm boxes", or what I would call cell builders, and 6 "shakers".  We (they, actually, since I was totally worthless the first day) drive into a yard with about 80 colonies, and start at one end.  We smoke the colony and drop it off the bottom board onto its face and pry the bottom hive body loose from the top deep.  This is difficult because of the ladders between the frames, holding everything together.  We put the top deep back on the bottom board, and the bottom deep goes on a stand that pushes the frames up out of the body so you don't have to pry them out.  One person looks through the bottom deep while the other looks through the top deep, searching for the queen peripherally while seeking sheets of good solid capped brood.  Then the deep now on the bottom is put back together with 10 frames, and with a queen excluder on top of it.  An empty hive body goes atop the excluder, and all the frames are transferred from the old body after a look for the queen, and all the rest of the bees shaken out on the ground in front of the hive.  Hopefully we now have at least 3 solid sheets of capped brood above the queen excluder, and the queen below it. The shakers are basically the same construction.
   The first day was the easiest one.  We were then off for the afternoon.  Good thing, it was 99'.  Thank heavens for ventilated suits.
     On the second day, we got an earlier start, as we needed to get to our swarm boxes before the bees started flying too much.  First, the shakers...we (they, again), take that top hive body off of the queen excluder and shake every bee off of every frame into a huge metal funnel that drops the bees into a huge screened box.  The queen excluder is removed, and the hive bodies reunited.  We now have lots and lots of nurse bees to add to our swarm boxes.  We just pick the swarm boxes up and put them on the back of the truck, moving them about a half hour away to another bee yard.  Upon arrival, we set the swarm boxes in their new locations, take the covers off and shake about 5 lbs of nurse bees out of the big screened cages into them, making super-full hives.  These get left alone one more day.  
   Then we go to yet another yard, with another 80 colonies, and try to find 6 sheets of larvae the right size for grafting.  Back to the house, and the fun begins!  Grafting, if you talk to a grafter, is easy, and anyone can do it.  Hah!  I thought the first day of trying was very hard, but this afternoon we checked and one of the frames I did, with 36 queen cups, had 16 cells growing, so not as bad as I thought.  That first afternoon, I did 6 bars of 12 cups, and Yonny did 29 in the same amount of time.  One of his frames of 36 that we checked had an acceptance rate of more like 28 out of 36.  Tomorrow, I'll let you know how this second day of grafting went, and tell you about a different technique of making swarm boxes and shakers.  We did 12 of each before grafting today.  T