HSC is pretty instantaneous and actually adding a box of them this time of year and feeding might get them filled with capped stores. But I probably wouldn't get too agressive with feeding them into the brood nest. You could feed them one at a time and see what happens.
Feed them one at a time? I do not understand this. I have one brood deep and one brood super ( which had an excluder between the 2, which I removed 9-1-07...
If I buy HSC...where do I place the HSC frames? Do I replace one frame at a time in each box?
Sorry for my ignorance...
If your going to go the HSC route, I have found that a gradual transition doesn't work well, you need to go all or nothing. Here is what I found to work best.
1. Place a queen excluder on the bottom board, them an full super of HSC and move the queen into this super.
2. Then another queen excluder on top of that followed by deep with any brood from the large cell frames.
3. After a couple of days, check to see if the queen is laying in the HSC and if she is, remove the queen excluder from the bottom board.
4. Once the brood has hatched out of the large cell, remove it and add the other deep of HSC.
5. Feed, Feed, Feed. If you feed before removing the large cell, don't over feed as they will just pack it away in the large cell. Just make sure they have enough food to survive until you can remove the large cell. Any that they do store on the large cell you can let them rob out once you remove it.
I have 4 hives that I moved to HSC and this method has worked best. If you don't force the queen to lay in the HSC, she will keep laying in the large cell and ignore the HSC and you will continue to make large cell bees. So feeding 1 HSC frame at a time just forces the queen down to a smaller laying area on the wax. I guess eventually she may move to HSC, but it is not going to happen until the majority of the frames are HSC.
I also sprayed the HSC with sugar water, but I'm not sure that helped or not, I have since stop doing that.
When she first starts to lay in the HSC, the pattern is pretty sporadic as she hunts around for acceptable cells. But as time goes on, and more and more cells are used, the HSC is accepted well. Here is a picture of a HSC frame that has gone thru a few brooding cycles and you can see the pattern is quite nice.
The nice thing about HSC, is you don't have to rely on the bees drawing comb to do the transition, so timing and weather conditions are less of an issue than when using starter strips. With HSC, the queen can continue to lay without a long period of interruption, so you continue to get a flow of new bees.