Queen rearing planner
Queen rearing runs on a clock that does not negotiate: a queen is sixteen days from egg to emergence, and nearly every failed batch is a missed date. Pick your graft day and this lays out the whole calendar — what happens, and when it cannot slip.
The calendar
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The take runs acceptance, emergence, mating weather, and mating-nuc losses together — most batches lose queens at every gate. Your own records will tune the percentage better than any default.
Where the calendar comes from. The standard bee math: a queen's egg hatches at about day 3½, her cell is capped at day 8 (±1), she emerges at day 16 (±1), and she is laying at about day 28 (±5) (the classic bee-math table, Northeast New Jersey Beekeepers Association). Grafting takes larvae under 24 hours old, so graft day is day 4 of that clock — count the planner's dates from your graft and the milestones land on the published ones: cells capped 4–5 days after grafting, ripe cells moved at day 10 (day 15 from the egg is the absolute latest), queens out at day 12, mating flights through about day 17–22, and the first egg check at day 24–28 (the day-by-day grafting calendar at Honey Garage works the same count). Cool weather pushes mating and laying later — treat the back of the calendar as the earliest, not the deadline.
An estimate. Larvae a few hours older or younger than you think shift emergence by a day either way. When a date and a cell disagree, believe the cell.
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