Cupularve NICOT®

01 · THE METHOD

What you do instead of grafting

The plate holds 110 cells that take as many plastic cup holders, held from behind by a backing plate. Two covers go on top: the queen excluder, which lets the workers through but keeps the queen on the plate, and the closing cover. Confined there, the queen lays inside the cups. Once the larva is 6 to 24 hours old you unclip its cup and move it to the cell bar frame in the finisher colony. That is the whole change, and it is a big one: the larva is never touched.

02 · ASSEMBLY

It screws into a brood frame

Cut a rectangle the size of the plate out of a comb of brood, in the middle of the frame, and fix the Cupularve with two wood screws. Fit the cups before mounting it and smear honey into the cells — that is what gets the workers to adopt and clean it. It pays to leave it in the middle of the brood weeks before you need it, without the excluder: it picks up the colony's scent and the queen goes in to lay far sooner on the day it matters. And always leave it with its cups in, because the bees fill an empty cell with brace comb.

03 · THE LAYING

Feed four days before, then count the days

Nicot recommends feeding the colony four days before confining the queen and through the laying. The queen goes into her compartment, closed with the B1 cap or with a good plug of honey-and-sugar paste if you would rather the workers free her themselves after 24 hours. With a strong colony, decent temperature and the plate right in the middle of the brood, the maker takes the laying as done on that first day; with less population or poor weather it drags on, so check before counting the batch as started. After that it is the usual calendar: a queen takes about 16 days from the egg, and the cells are protected before the first one emerges.

04 · LIMITS

What the kit cannot do for you

Taking out the grafting removes one source of error, not the rest. Queens are still made by the nurse bees, the pollen and a strong colony, and they need mature drones in the air when they fly to mate. Nor does it fix rearing from an aggressive or diseased colony: you would only be multiplying that. Two warnings that come with the plastic: leave a bee space of at least 8 mm so the workers can move over the plate, and if you put it in wax do not go above 65 °C — from 75 °C it starts to deform.

05 · BEFORE YOU BUY

What arrives is the plate assembly: the 110 cells with their backing plate, the queen excluder cover and the closing cover, in a piece of 13 × 14.6 × 4 cm weighing 164 g. It is the original NICOT Cupularve.