We use the incubator from the 8th day to the 11th (sometimes until the 12th).
Inspired by the advices of many people, I created a heating system in an old refrigerator. I often had problems with some queens’ batch. Fortunately, those problems stopped the day I changed the thermostat and the resistance. In fact, since the day I adapted a wire resistor without inertia, all my problems disappeared. It is better to work with an incubator from the market.
Thereby, we continued to perseverate on this “refrigerated system“, which allows us to stock all the clips identified with the colonies’ name; we move them on the apiaries 3 days later, for the insertion of our cells.
The grafting traceability from the cells insertion in the nuclei or in the swarms is possible because of this technique.

Incubator’s arrangement:

• 1 fridge
• 1 heating resistance, without inertia
• 1 thermostat for the incubator
• 1 container filled with water to assure an air saturated with water
• 1 small fan so the air circulates

The 11th day after the grafting, we remove the royal cells in order to insert them in our swarms or in our nuclei. We put hair roller cages on the unused cells.
In some cases, we allow the queen bee to be born in the incubator, for example for the start of the nuclei or if we have too many cells. The virgin queens are put in a small cage and placed in the incubator at 27°c.