- We're gonna talk today about incubators.
We've got a commercially available incubator here and we got a do it yourself incubator
here.
We're gonna focus mostly on the do it yourself one but when we harvest queen cells from our
cell builder colonies, we take the frame out, I've got one right here, so we take that out
of our cell builder and we keep it vertical, we try not to bump the frame at all, and we
gently brush the bees off the, off these cells, and then we bring that, the frame, into our
workshop where it's a nice warm temperature, we're outta the wind, and we have all the
tools and so on at our disposal.
So we can then take each of these individual queen cells off the bar here and then transfer
them into the incubator.
But let's have a look at the incubators first.
The commercially available one has a tray inside that we can put the cells in individually.
Underneath that, there's a heating element built into the tool box design here, and so
that's heating up from the bottom, and it's set to heat at 32 to 34 degrees to keep, Celsius,
to keep that, the cells at the brood nest temperature.
It's 12 volts, so we can plug it into our vehicle battery or into our vehicle or into
a battery or into a battery charger.
So that's the commercial unit.
This is worth about $1,000, so not everybody's gonna wanna be going out and buying one of
those and I really think we need to be thinking about using queen cells more in beekeeping
than we do right now, so I'd really love it if people were able to learn more about how
to handle those cells.
It's really not that hard to do and there are some key advantages to using queen cells.
Number one: they're available earlier in the spring so in our area here, that's an advantage
because people wanna make up splits fairly early.
Number two: when you use a queen cell, the colony you introduce that to goes through
a broodless period, which means the Varroa mite levels crash, so it's a really effective
way of controlling your Varroa mites in the spring so that the build up through the rest
of the summer is much lower.
So that's another advantage.
The, they're much cheaper than a mated queen and the, they're locally, generally, locally
available from a local bee breeder or queen rearer.
For the queen rearer, some advantages there are that they don't need to have all their
mating nucleus colonies set up and they can crank out lots of queen cells, so.
The only disadvantage is that you only get half of the genetics from that queen rearer
or bee breeder, but that's not such a significant disadvantage.
The, let's look at the do it yourself incubator now.
So it's a, let's see here, it's a 16 quart or 22 litre incubator, that's an ideal size,
and then inside that, we have a hot water bottle.
We've done some experiments with this to know that we're getting the right temperature and
know how well it works.
We fill, we run our tap until the tap water is as hot as it's going to be, and then we
fill that right up with the hot water and then we swoop our incubator, or move that
into our incubator here.
Just lay that down in the bottom of the incubator.
And you can see it's a nice fit in the bottom there.
And then we fill this up so that we have shavings going four inches above the top of the hot
water bottle.
That insulates the hot water bottle so that the cells that we're gonna put in don't get
too hot from the hot water.
And about 10 - 15 minutes, the temperature in here comes up to the right, the brood temperature,
brood nest temperature.
So we'll put the shavings in now and we'll fill that up to our pre-marked four inches
here.
We just pour those in, fill it up to four inches there, kinda level it out.
A little bit more.
We set that up.
And now what we're gonna do is we're gonna take the cells off the graft bar.
So we've got the frame there that has the graft bars in it.
We'll gently take that off and we'll lean it in here.
And we really are careful that we don't tip that over.
And then we use a hive tool and pry, very gently, each individual cell off.
We then make a little impression in the shavings with a finger, put the cell in, and then just
snug the shavings up around that cell, and repeat the process here.
In an incubator like this, you can put in 40 or 50 cells or 2 or 3, whatever you want.
Once that's done, you got all the cells in there that you want, then we close it up and
that will keep these cells at the correct temperature for up to five hours.
So that means the beekeeper that's buying the cells from a queen rearer has then time
to get those cells home and get them introduced to their queenless colony.
It's important that colony has no queen when we're introducing a queen cell.
We then leave the cells to hatch out over the next day or two, let the queens fly out
and mate, and within a couple weeks, we should have a mated queen.
We just go into the colony and check to see if we have eggs.
If so, we have a mated queen.
So it's very simple, nothing to it, it's just a matter of handling them carefully, keeping
them at the right temperature, and getting them installed in a timely manner.
Thanks for watching, see ya next time.