Which to buy - Jenter or Nicot

[Kiwi Bee 589]

I was wondering which queen rearing kit set to buy.

Jenter or Nicot

Any opinion?

[Kiwifruiter 605]

Jenter

[Happy 76]

Neither, get some cell cups and a grafting tool and do it when you want to. Don’t be trapped in some hellish self imposed timetable where one variable can ruin weeks of preparation ?

[Alastair 8,564]

They are both good but jenter is available here, I have 4 of them and very happy.

 

Happy's comment is correct, with jenter you do have to follow the timetable, ie, put the queen in it, then graft 4 days later. If that's too hard go with grafting. But what I like about jenter is the plug is transferred with all the royal jelly, which does not happen when you graft.

Edited October 12, 2017 by Alastair

[Ali 546]

I only do a few and have hand grafted but also have a Jenter (which I recommend too). Either way we are bound to a time table really, the bees dictate to a degree. 

I have found some Queens slow to start laying in the Jenter (sulking?) and or the girls filling the laying cells with nectar. Both a pain.

Have you thought of the cut cell method? I want to try this way myself, no waiting, just choose the frame and go. 

[Happy 76]

With the Chinese grafting tool I seem to get a great dollop of jelly the well fed grub is floating in.  I also seem to get quite nicely sized cells. From woa to go can be grafting in 1/2 an hour and still get 90% takes. Beats the week lead in for jenta and nicot. Have tried both and weather and life gets in the way. One day late and your carefully prepared grubs are wasted and it’s another 4 or 5 days until the next lot are ready ( if your breeder cooperates) lots of fun for those who enjoy complexity and expense 

[Scutellator 52]

Just now, Kiwi Bee said:

I was wondering which queen rearing kit set to buy.

Jenter or Nicot

Any opinion?

Why not Eziqueen? It is NZ made and has 4x more beds than either of the two. Very usefull for royal jelly production.

But from the two I would say Nicot. Less parts, plus the cells (disposable) and the cell holders can still be used for grafting if you change your mind.

 

The flipside is that one cassete is needed for each breeder ( e.g. for 500 hives about 10 breeders should be used) and is not very sanitary to move the cassete from one breeder to another ( those queens are expensive)

 

[Philbee 4,672]

An experiment Ive often intended is to prepare a Queenless nuc and graft a couple of individual cell cups from a donor and place the cups in a nuc.

Basically a modified walk away.

??

[Alastair 8,564]

Works fine, just, it's slower than putting point of hatch cells in the nuc.

[Philbee 4,672]

4 minutes ago, Alastair said:

Works fine, just, it's slower than putting point of hatch cells in the nuc.

Maybe an option in the field then for a Queenless hive

[BeeGirl 118]

On ‎13‎/‎10‎/‎2017 at 9:18 AM, Happy said:

With the Chinese grafting tool I seem to get a great dollop of jelly the well fed grub is floating in.  I also seem to get quite nicely sized cells. From woa to go can be grafting in 1/2 an hour and still get 90% takes. Beats the week lead in for jenta and nicot. Have tried both and weather and life gets in the way. One day late and your carefully prepared grubs are wasted and it’s another 4 or 5 days until the next lot are ready ( if your breeder cooperates) lots of fun for those who enjoy complexity and expense 

The past couple of years I've used Ceracell's metal grafting tool with an okay success rate. I recently heard that a grafting brush was a good tool to use, so in anticipation of getting my success rate up I went ahead and purchased one. Last weekend I grafted using the brush and when I checked the grafts yesterday I was hugely disappointed with what grafts actually took. I grafted again, this time with the metal grafting tool, checked again today and have got a much better success rate. I'm keen to give the Chinese grafting tool a go - the grafting brush will go into my art kit.

I have also got the Jenter system, but like others, have found this form of raising queens too restrictive in both time and weather.

[Philbee 4,672]

1 hour ago, BeeGirl said:

The past couple of years I've used Ceracell's metal grafting tool with an okay success rate. I recently heard that a grafting brush was a good tool to use, so in anticipation of getting my success rate up I went ahead and purchased one. Last weekend I grafted using the brush and when I checked the grafts yesterday I was hugely disappointed with what grafts actually took. I grafted again, this time with the metal grafting tool, checked again today and have got a much better success rate. I'm keen to give the Chinese grafting tool a go - the grafting brush will go into my art kit.

I have also got the Jenter system, but like others, have found this form of raising queens too restrictive in both time and weather.

Did you use the same starter bees/ hive

It could be that what changed was the status of the hive rather than the quality of the grafts

[Alastair 8,564]

Plus with a brush it is very much about how you use it, and just what brush. I had to hunt hard and long through art shops to get just the right brush, that's when I used to graft.

[BeeGirl 118]

3 hours ago, Philbee said:

Did you use the same starter bees/ hive

It could be that what changed was the status of the hive rather than the quality of the grafts

I used another hive that was very similair to my first one. I did think that there may be a better take of the grafts if I used the same hive, but I wanted to experiment, so used a different, but similar hive.

[Goran 1,462]

I think I wrote somewhere here how my mentor say:  Nicot is bad copy of Jenter. I would also advise jenter. Also always would advise jenter before any grafting if You go for quality.. Now again that are also words of my mentor with which I agree.. 

[Happyjack 9]

I used the Jenter system for the first time this year and was delighted with the results. Have tried the imitation Nicot ones from China and not been impressed with the results. Jenter seems to have the build quality (although it comes with a very hefty price tag)

 

Yes both Jenter and Nicot are very restrictive in terms of timing and being lucky with the weather but for someone with less than 20/20 vision for grafting these solutions are excellent.

 

Only really needed a four or so queens but ended up 23 cells which translated into 15 successfully mated queens (I'm happy with a 65% mating rate given the atrocious weather period here in Gizzy in the two weeks from when they emerged). 

[Alastair 8,564]

All queen raising is done on a schedule which must be stuck to rain or hail. Now I'm kind of retired and only need 40 or 50 cells a week in season, I use jenter and have queen raising down to just 2 days a week. Here's what I do. Well 3 days but 2 of those days are just a few minutes. Wednesday morning I put the queen in the jenter. Thursday I let her out. Sunday afternoon is the bigger day, I transfer the plugs to the cell raising bars, put them in the truck incubator and drive to the cell raising yard. Make 3 queenless cell raisers and put the 3 bars in. Take the capped cells from the previous sunday and put them in the truck incubator, take them home and put them in the shed incubator. 

 

It's that simple. A few minutes wednesday and thursday, and a couple hours maybe sunday arvo.

 

Just for interest, the cells will hatch the following thursday. So monday or tuesday I make nucs, splits, or whatever, and put the cells in them on wednesday.

 

It may seem complex but when I was raising queens for a commercial breeder we were grafting 5 days a week, several hundred per day, into wax queen cells that we made ourselves. That required strict adherance to the schedule so I got used to that, what I do now seems very simple.

[Kiwi Bee 589]

10 hours ago, Alastair said:

........................... Make 3 queenless cell raisers and put the 3 bars in. .........................

 

Do you make them like @frazz? Shake nurses from different hives into the cell raiser till is over flowing with bees and add only capped brood and fresh food.... and the bar with the cells?

[Alastair 8,564]

Not quite, I'm using a rough and ready non standard way, purely to cut down the number of trips I have to make to the cell raising yard. The site is a sunny and early site, there are currently some nice strong 3 deckers there with 2 brood boxes.

 

So I find the queen in a hive and move her in one box to a temporary place, I give her just enough bees to keep stuff going. The other hive is now one brood box, an excluder, and a super, it is jam packed with bees. I put the cells in the bottom box with the brood. The next week I go through the brood box and kill any rogue queen cells they have made, take the capped cells out and give them a new bar of cells to raise. The next week I remove the capped cells again and recombine the hive with the queen, or they will get tired and not raise such good cells.

 

At this stage I've also been shaking a package or two of bees from the hive to add to nucs. That's just to stop them swarming and refresh them, they'll recover and be good to raise cells again in a month and a half.

[BeeGirl 118]

12 hours ago, Alastair said:

I put the cells in the bottom box with the brood.

I recently read an article where the cell raising bar is placed in the hive the day before to warm to hive temperature and take on the hive's scent. The cell cups with the larvae are then placed in the cell raising bar the following day. The claim for this is less rejections. I've never bothered with this, but wondered if others have tried this method and have noticed differing results. 

[Alastair 8,564]

If grafting into plastic, it's always a good idea to put the bars and the plastic cell cups, into a hive for 24 hours for cleaning, before doing the graft.

[Trevor Gillbanks 6,804]

6 hours ago, Alastair said:

If grafting into plastic, it's always a good idea to put the bars and the plastic cell cups, into a hive for 24 hours for cleaning, before doing the graft.

Do you recycle/ reuse plastic cups. 

[Alastair 8,564]

Yes if I can be bothered. For the normal plastic grafting type cups I had a tool made from a hacksaw blade designed to give a twirl in each cup to remove whatever grunge and old royal jelly was in there. After that the cells were put on bars and into a hive for further cleaning, for used and scraped cups a couple of days is best. But even new cups need cleaning by the bees to remove mold oil plus do whatever else it is bees do to them, not essential, but will increase the take of grafted larvae.

Edited October 20, 2017 by Alastair

[Scutellator 52]

On 15.10.2017 г. at 6:04 AM, BeeGirl said:

....I recently heard that a grafting brush was a good tool to use, so in anticipation of getting my success rate up I went ahead and purchased one. Last weekend I grafted using the brush and when I checked the grafts yesterday I was hugely disappointed with what grafts actually took.

 

 

I suppose you used saliva for the #000 brush. It is said that the saliva increase the rejected grafts.

The best grafting tool I am aware of is the Swiss one (not it's Chinese imitation)

The Chinese grafting tool (with the bamboo pusher) is also good, doesn't require a sharp eye, but it is much slower than the Swiss one.

On 15.10.2017 г. at 9:40 PM, Goran said:

I think I wrote somewhere here how my mentor say:  Nicot is bad copy of Jenter. I would also advise jenter. Also always would advise jenter before any grafting if You go for quality.. Now again that are also words of my mentor with which I agree.. 

I have an issues with the authority persons. Even the most erudite one sometimes speaks complete nonsense (don't ask me how I know that)

As far as I know there are two models of Jenter. The one allows to pick up every second bottom in the row at once. So which one your mentor has in mind?

The idea of Jenter is stolen from a plastic fondation with some removable bottoms from the Balkans in the middle of the '80s, whereas the idea for the removable cups, as far as I've been told, is a Russian patent. Nicot has one Turkish replicate ( same for eziqueen) and I hear now - one Chinese as well, and at least one imitation (45 cups). They all work differently.

 

 

On 19.10.2017 г. at 10:51 PM, BeeGirl said:

I recently read an article where the cell raising bar is placed in the hive the day before to warm to hive temperature and take on the hive's scent. The cell cups with the larvae are then placed in the cell raising bar the following day. The claim for this is less rejections. 

I've had such experience with carniolan type of bees. When the cups were not had been placed in a hive before the grafting - complete disaster. Never had the same issues with Italian type of bees. In the European countries where the queen rearer has a choice, Carnica is seldom used in the queen rearing. It makes it more difficult.

[Goran 1,462]

This one: http://www.karl-jenter-shop.eu/

 

As obligatory I prewax the queen cells ( not insert cups). I place the frame with jenter few days before use in the colony to bees leave the scent and polish the insert cups. Also I like to spray breeding comb a little with sugar syrup to bees start immediatelly with preparing the cups ( not necessary, more as peace of my mind).

About grafting and kits.. Well, for myself if I can choose I always will choose kit ( eyesight isn't a issue, still have no need for glasses). That is my belief due some learnings, readings, experience ( direct and indirect) and that somehow suits me and for me I raise nice queens. One of books I liked are Better queens by Jay Smith. Of the learning is that the royall jelly is different for larvae depending in  which stage of growing it is ( it start as "colostrum"). Don't forget I am amateur beek and all this may be too shallow for firm reasons of my stands.. but oblivion is a bliss.. I don't advise all should do the same I do, I am strongly for that the people use what suits them and what they think is right for them ( as long as they don't step on my toe. .). 

About kits pre-jenter I read couple years ago about one bulgarian kit of which autor of the text claimed that jenter idea came from it.. To go deeper in it for me is pointless..