Spring is near sprung down here, and the girls are off with a hiss and a roar.
Likely next week I'll be taking a day off to graft some queens. I'm aiming for 68 queens total: - we have 30 hives that we will split in half and want a queen for each, and another 8 I will just requeen without splitting.
There are three hives in particular that I want to breed from. I was thinking I'd like, if possible, to do my first round of queens from two of them, so the third is available as a backup if I need to kick in another round of queens for any failures in the first round, and to breed the final replacements for the original three hives.
The hives I want to use are two boxes high and fighting fit - ready for a third to go on anytime, though it's only the official start of spring tomorrow.
Question: How many cells can/should you graft into hive for optimal success.
The last two years I was working in ¾ depth hives and was grafting in just 15 cells on a single cell-bar frame. With the full depth boxes this year I can put two bars in a cell bar frame, with 15-20 cells per bar… but does the capacity of the hive to rear good queens drop as the number of cells goes up?