Queen Rearing Frame With Roller Cages - Cell Bar ( unassembled )

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Stop one early virgin from destroying a whole batch of queen cells The Queen Rearing Frame with Roller Cages protects your entire batch of queen cells through emergence, so every v irgin hatches safely without destroying her sisters. When you graft a batch of queen cells, they all come ripe within a day of each other, and that is where the trouble starts. The first virgin to chew her way out goes straight looking for her sisters and stings them through the cell wall before they get the chance to hatch. Left alone in the cell builder, one early queen can tear down a whole batch in an afternoon. This frame is how you stop that happening. It is a standard-size frame fitted with roller cages, the little barred cages that sit over a sealed queen cell. You cage each ripe cell a day or two before it is due to emerge, and the virgin then hatches into her own cage instead of out into the colony. Workers still feed her through the bars and her scent still spreads through the hive, but she cannot reach her sisters and they cannot reach her. It fits a normal hive, holds a row of cells at once. Why caging the cells matters A capped queen cell is the most valuable and most fragile thing in the hive at that point. You have put days of grafting, feeding and careful timing into it, and a single uncaged virgin can undo the lot in minutes. The roller cages turn that race into a non-event. Every queen emerges into her own space, none of them get stung in the cell, and you finish the round with a frame of live virgins rather than one survivor standing over a row of torn-down cells. How you use it Cage the cells once they are capped and starting to harden, around day ten after grafting, before any of them are due to hatch. From there you can leave the frame in the cell builder or move it across to an incubator, whichever way you work. A drop of honey in the bottom of each cage gives the new virgin something to eat the moment she is out, which buys you a day or two to get your mating nucs ready. Just do not leave her caged much longer than that, since a virgin needs to be in a colony to be looked after properly. Who it is for This is a tool for Australian beekeepers who have moved past walk-away splits and are grafting or raising cells on purpose. If you are still buying mated queens or letting a hive raise its own, you do not need it yet. But the moment you are raising more than one or two queens at a time, protecting the batch through emergence is the difference between a good round and a wasted one. Specifications Type: queen rearing cell frame fitted with roller cages Size: standard frame, fits most Langstroth hives Roller cages: barred cages that sit over each sealed queen cell Use: protecting and collecting emerging virgin queens Includes: complete frame with integrated roller cages Show more