June 30 Starting with my Nicot Queen Rearing kit
Day 1 of Nicot is to let the bees clean it so you leave the top cover off.
Day 2 you find a queen and put her inside. Nurse bees and entourage will follow.
Day 3 look for eggs. If you have as many as you can use, free the queen and leave the front cover off the Nicot. This is day 1 of the 16 day queen development cycle.
Day 7 (Day 4 of queen development) Look for larvae and move to your vertical frames. (Edit: I think I messed up on this step. The nurse bees took out the eggs once I released the queen, even from the vertical frames. I think we need to move the vertical frames with eggs into a queenless hive for them to do the needful. )
Day 11 or 12, check for capped queen cells and put on protective cages. This would be day 8 or 9 on the queen development cycle. Or you can move these queens to where you want them to go as long as there isn't already a queen there.
Day 19 your queens should emerge. If you didn't cage them, they will fight to the death with other queens.
Day 20 buy mated queens for $40 a piece because this darn thing didn't work after two tries. Will update if I ever get it to work.