Nicot® Bar with 11 Cups for Royal Jelly Production

01 · NOTHING TO HOLD IT

Where this piece sits in the system

The assembly has three links and this is the last one. The 11-slot cell cup bar is fixed to the 16 mm wooden bar of the rearing frame; the strip drops into those slots in one piece, and the larva goes into each cup. Whoever works with single blocks swaps the bar for those blocks. On its own the strip has nothing to hold on to.

02 · WHOLE STRIP OR SINGLE CUPS

What you pay for is the row already aligned

The 13.5 cm of the strip match the length of the cell cup bar exactly: the 11 cups sit evenly spaced and level, with no placing them one by one. Beekeepers working with single cups —individual blocks or the Cupularve plate— have their format in the loose cell cup, which costs less per unit.

03 · THE LARVA IS MEASURED IN HOURS

Grafting is decided by age, not by size

Acceptance is decided by the age of the larva: 12 hours is the ideal and it is best not to go past 24. Count from the laying of the donor frame and pick the smallest larvae in the comb. Prime the cup with a drop of diluted royal jelly and lay the larva down without turning it over; the translucent brown lets you check against the light that it sits right.

04 · THE TWO CLOCKS

The season is won between January and May

A batch is set up when there are drones flying to mate and spare nurse bees to feed: from late winter to early summer. After that the calendar rules: royal jelly is harvested after 3 days; if you are after queens, the cell is capped around day five and emerges around day twelve, so it is caged around day ten.

05 · BEFORE YOU BUY

Three warnings. This is not the cell cup bar: the two are named almost the same, measure the same and cost the same, but this is the cup and that is the holder. One bar is supplied, even though the reference carries a “/100” that comes from the supplier packaging. And it belongs to the NICOT system: it does not replace Jenter or JZBZ cups.