Cloake Board: The Essential Tool for Sustainable Queen Rearing
$52.95
Overview: Experience the ease of queen rearing with the Cloake Board, a revolutionary beekeeping equipment innovated by Harry Cloake. This board is a cost-effective solution, especially for beginners in queen rearing, streamlining the process with minimal disturbance to the hive.
Key Features:
- Innovative Design: The Cloake board, available in various configurations, features a wooden frame with an additional entrance and a grooved interior to insert a metal tray. It also includes a queen excluder at the bottom or separately, depending on the model.
- Simple & Effective: Ideal for beekeepers with a limited number of hives, this method allows for the raising of high-quality queens using just a single hive, encompassing the roles of donor, cell starter, and cell finisher.
- Versatile Application: Compatible with 10 FRAME equipment, the Cloake board method involves stages that divide a colony into a queen-right lower colony and a queenless upper colony, enhancing the acceptance of grafted larva or facilitating natural queen cell creation.
How To Use:
- Place the Cloake board between two hive bodies, ensuring the queen is in the lower body. The board, fitted with a queen excluder, keeps the queen restricted below.
- Move frames with larvae to the upper box, attracting nurse bees essential for future queen cells.
- Use the metal divider to separate the colony into two parts, creating a higher bee population in the upper colony for effective queen rearing.
- Once queenless, the upper colony begins creating emergency queen cells, focusing attention on a single brood frame.
- Rejoin the colonies with the slide-in-divider removed, allowing the combined colony to incubate the grafted queens.
Benefits:
- Ease of Use: Simple to operate, the Cloake board method is popular among newer beekeepers for its straightforward approach.
- Efficient Queen Production: Ensures a high success rate in queen rearing, with field bees contributing to a conducive environment for queen development.
- Focus on Bee Traits: Allows selection of colonies with desired traits like gentleness, laying pattern, pest tolerance, and honey collection for queen rearing.
Conclusion: The Cloake board is an indispensable tool for modern beekeepers looking to raise queens efficiently and sustainably. Its user-friendly design and effective queen-rearing process make it a must-have for both novice and experienced beekeepers.