HoneyBeeSuite, 6/7/2012
Editor’s note: Our international correspondent spent the
second leg of her beekeeping trip in New Zealand. So far, she has written three
articles about her New Zealand adventures, but we are waiting for final
permission to publish the first two. Today’s story is about grafting larvae
with the ultimate goal of harvesting royal jelly.
We wake up at 5:30, slap together some sandwiches, and I
wrestle a bee suit that’s two extras too large. An hour later, we’re on site,
pulling fresh brood from a yard of nucs. There aren’t many bees inside—the
strong colonies were taken to the honey flow long ago—but nevertheless we pull
two or three frames per colony. In total, we need three boxes (30 frames) of
graftable brood and one box of sealed brood. We’ll use the sealed brood later
to bolster the starter colonies.
Pulling brood means finding queens, and I’m no good at
finding queens when I want to convince people that I’m good at finding queens.
When I’m nervous, I forget what I’m doing and wind up missing the queen for the
bees. I start admiring and stop searching. My eyes catch on emerging bees, pale
yellow birthdays, bustling workers, and bumbling drones. I turn the frames over
in my hands, observing without assessing, tucking the queen back into her hive,
completely oblivious. I usually miss a couple this way before I have no more
cool to lose, and then I can relax and do the job right.
It takes us a few hours to find sufficient frames. Then at
9:30 we head to the grafting shed, which is a small shack in a big field with a
bench, some stools, and a radio. We turn on the generator, hunch over our
frames, and begin scooping up larvae almost too small to see. We place these
larvae into plastic queen cups. There are three rows of cups on each frame and
twenty cups per row. The experts average a sixty per cent success rate. These
guys have been grafting six days a week since Christmas, and some of them are
on their second or third year…
No comments:
Post a Comment