Cell raising starting and finishing

This we have refined our cell raising methods, the cells are grafted into plastic cups using a chinese grafting tool. The cell bar is the top bar of a normal wooden frame as seen below, this is a simple piece of equipment easy to replace.
The grafted cell bars, I normally graft two at a time, are placed in the queen-less half of a split colony which contains only capped brood the colony is fed sugar syrup. Two bars is 38 grafts which gives about 30 queen cells on our current percentage take.
We have split the colonies 24hrs before grafting but have recently found that splitting immediately before grafting produced the same number of accepted grafts.
Twenty four hours(ish) we put the two halves of the split colony back together to finish the cells. The queenless split introduces the emergency response to initiate cell production and the queen-right finisher relys on the supercedure instinct to finish good quality cells. Thats the theory, who knows but it seems to work


Against conventional wisdom I find that I get better acceptance if I graft into the starter colony straight after splitting rather than leaving for 24 hrs so the bees "realise" they are queenless. Will experiment more with this later.