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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Hey! You are both right! Queen and bee cages are made of plastic or sometimes wood and metal mesh. But having protective cells can be useful. If you add a queen-cell in a colony a few days before birth, that queen will almost always be accepted. In case of mated queens, their pheromones are strong enough that they will be often (but less probable depending of the season and presence of young larvae) accepted. Usually we put mated queens in a cage with some sugar so that the bees eat trough it, giving time to the queen to disperse her pheromones. Virgin queens however have the lowest acceptance rate, and it is sometimes better to re-encage them in a (now plastic) cell with a wax cover so that she will be born again. For the foundations, it is a little more difficult than just pressing at the moment, but the size of most of frame-standards would impose the use of huge machines. But it would be less human-energy consuming than the actual method