Requeening with cells

From last weeks grafts I had about 60 cells available, although I graded 12out due to their small size. These cells were used to re-queen all my hives. We use cells to re-queen as it saves the workload involved with mating queens and the high attrition rate when introducing mated queens into the hive.
Below you see the Caricell loaded straight from the nursery colonies ready for grading and wrapping. I decided to re-queen all the bought in New Zealand queens as they don't winter well and after experiencing the bad temper of the Buckfast queens, I have been doing them as well. See below the number of stings in my gloves after working a couple of Buckfast colonies.


The expansion is moving along OK, we have over 30 colonies at this site, this is 10 or more than normal so we will be moving a number down to our new site a few miles away the other side of Leominster.
We have another 2 weeks available to increase the number of colonies after that we will be concentrating on preparation for winter.
The colonies are in good shape with young queens and plenty of flying bees. If we get a couple of weeks decent weather we should get through the year with an acceptable harvest. Time will tell.