We decided to do one final queen grafting for the season. In the top picture Mary is grafting newly hatched eggs from Sue Cobey’s New World Carniolan breeder queen. We turned off the air conditioning in the house about an hour before Mary began the grafting so we would not impact the 3 day old eggs.
Once completed we moved the grafted eggs to the our cell builder colony. We then drove to one of our production yards about four miles away to field graft newly hatched eggs from a daughter of a Ray Revis Russian queen. It was over 90 degrees so Mary did the field grafting under the cover of Tulip Poplar trees. We then covered the plastic cells with a dampened cloth and headed back to the cell builder to add these new grafts. Mary’s has had a 90% success rate so far this season with her grafts. We will know within 24 hours on how many of today’s (40) grafts took.
