Had a langstroth nuc with queen cells. Was transferring a frame to a top bar hive I was hoping to get started and had to cut the frame down to fit. In the process the comb fell apart. Luckily there was still a nice 4" x 5" chunk in one piece which had the two queen cells.
Was not sure how to attach this to a top bar. On the fly it was pretty easy to attach the bottom of the chunk, which slid out from the bottom of the original frame, to a top bar I sawed in half and screwed back together.
I know a queen won't lay in upside down brood, but I was hoping the existing brood and queen cells would hatch out and then I could scrap this frame. In hindsight now I am concerned that maybe having the queen cell upside down (pointing up) could be a bad thing.
What I have now is a queenless tbh with the 4x5 upside down chunk frame with 2 queen cells, the original frame cut to fit with spacers and an inch of the orignal comb on basically like a starter strip, and then around 10 top bars with no drawn comb. In addition I shook in 2 frames of bees from the orignal nuc.
Any advice on this? Have I ruined the queen cells? Should I cut out the queen cells and reattach them? I've never cut queen cells so am unsure how to attach them to a frame.
Thanks,
dmac
Was not sure how to attach this to a top bar. On the fly it was pretty easy to attach the bottom of the chunk, which slid out from the bottom of the original frame, to a top bar I sawed in half and screwed back together.
I know a queen won't lay in upside down brood, but I was hoping the existing brood and queen cells would hatch out and then I could scrap this frame. In hindsight now I am concerned that maybe having the queen cell upside down (pointing up) could be a bad thing.
What I have now is a queenless tbh with the 4x5 upside down chunk frame with 2 queen cells, the original frame cut to fit with spacers and an inch of the orignal comb on basically like a starter strip, and then around 10 top bars with no drawn comb. In addition I shook in 2 frames of bees from the orignal nuc.
Any advice on this? Have I ruined the queen cells? Should I cut out the queen cells and reattach them? I've never cut queen cells so am unsure how to attach them to a frame.
Thanks,
dmac