Do You Have a Nuc?

I am a firm believer that every beekeeper who has had a hive live through one Winter should have a Nuc – 12 months out of the year. Over the past 6 weeks, I have run into maybe a dozen or more beekeepers (personally) that could have used one, but didn’t have one available.

Everyone is familiar with the early Spring Nuc’s. Many folks start their beekeeping career by purchasing one from another Nuc. I sell many Nuc’s for this exact purpose. So, if you have no inclination to ‘sell Spring Nuc’s’, why would you need the daggone thing?! Because ‘selling Nuc’s’ is not the real reason that folks raise Nuc’s. The real reason is to create a Sustainable Beekeeping program.

If you are in your first year as a beekeeper, you will hopefully have little need of a Nuc. In addition, your main goal is to get your new hives built up – taking a few frames from this new, growing hive is not a good idea. Your goal is to get your hives through the Winter. If you do that successfully, you’ll begin a part of your beekeeping career that will be rivaled by little else. The last thing you want to do is to put this wonderful experience at risk. So, this post does not apply to the first year beekeepers.

So, what’s this stuff about ‘sustainable beekeeping’? It focuses on one simple fact – using your own resources (bees) you build an apiary (or multiple apiaries) that enable you to meet all ‘bee’ needs that you have with your own bees. If you want to add a few hives, you build them from your own hives. If something goes wrong, you fix it with resources from your own hives. Many folks believe that the only way to do this is if you have a few dozen hives. But, that is wrong. You only need 2 hives and one Nuc.

So, how is it that you would have a Nuc on every day of the year and why?

It all begins with the Spring Nuc. As your bees come out of Winter, you will have at least one hive that is doing well. They have moved up into the top box (by that, I mean that the queen has started laying up there) and the bottom box is full of brood coming on. At this time, you take 2 frames of brood and 1 of honey. The brood frames need to have pollen in them, otherwise you’ll need to add a frame with pollen. One of the brood frames must have forager eggs. When you transfer the bees, a bunch will come with them, but you still need to shake a frame or two of bees into the Nuc box. Nurse bees have never flown before and will simply call the new Nuc their home. Nurse bees are also critical in the raising of a new queen, so you want to take frames with brood (uncapped is best) and shake them hard into your Nuc, getting as many bees as you can into it. Of course, you must identify and set your queen (the frame she is on) asside (yet another good reason to mark you queens) first, as you do not want to shake her into the Nuc. I put foundation for the rest of the frames. I always do this with March/April Nucs, as it gives the bees something to do as they wait for the new queen to hatch, mate and finally start laying.

At this point, you have created your Bank. You put bees in and can take them out in the future, if you need them. The bees will create a new queen that will hatch in around 16 days. I typically go into the hive on Day 21 (it’s always a factor of 7 because I have to do my day job during the weekdays!) and make sure I find an open queen cell. Once found, I leave them alone (I am not looking for the queen, yet…) for another 2 weeks. At that point, I expect to find eggs and larvae. If I don’t, I give the Nuc ANOTHER frame with capped brood and eggs (eggs being the key.) This time, I shake the bees off into the parent hive – I am not trying to bring more bees to my Nuc. If they have a queen that is simply taking a while to lay or maybe I missed the eggs with my old eyes, they’ll raise the brood and simply add it to their force. BUT, if the queen was eaten by a dragon fly or otherwise perished, they’ll raise a new queen from these eggs. I start the process over again (wait 3, and then 2, weeks). If you miss these checks and the queen didn’t make it, you’ll end up with a Nuc that has laying workers, an entirely other problem.

So, now you have your Spring Nuc. Since you’re not raising them to sell, you do not feed them and let them build on their own. They’ll do just fine. They may even swarm, which is not a problem (they’re just your bank). The main thing you need to do with them is to check them for a queen every 3 to 4 weeks. That’s it. In truth, just look for capped brood. The second you don’t see capped brood, drop a frame of eggs in her! Done!

So, why do this? It’s not a lot of work, but why do it at all? For one, you have a mated queen (local, to boot) ready to go if one of your main hives has a problem. Queenless? You have an answer with your mated Nuc queen. Did a main hive swarm and you aren’t sure if the new queen made it back? Give them a frame of eggs from the Bank Nuc. Do you need to bolster a colony because of some mishap? Give them a frame of capped brood from the Bank Nuc. You have now taken the first step towards ‘sustainability’. You need no outside resources to keep your hives going during the Summer.

So, July comes along and you have this Nuc on your hands. You can sell the thing (a little to offset the cost of beekeeping), let them have a go of it  through the Winter or you can start an Overwintered Nuc. An overwintered Nuc for me is a way to cull my hives of underperformers and its an insurance policy against Winter loss. The Overwintered Nuc is an Insurance Policy (not a bank). Strictly speaking, you want a Nuc that is lead by a Queen that was born in late July (in our area – around Richmond, Virginia). I break up my weak hives to create them, but if you have your Bank going, you can simply pinch your current queen and turn the Bank into an Insurance Policy. I am a firm believer in Overwintered Nucs. They have a brand new queen that really never gets to pour it on before Winter Prep starts. She has to downshift almost immediately and stay mostly idle through the Winter. I can assure you that queens like this come out of Winter like no other. One of my best Overwintered Nucs from last Winter has two drawn deeps, 2 mediums of capped honey and a 3rd medium that they just started to draw before the Nectar flow became a dribble. By creating an Overwintering Nuc, you have an insurance policy against the loss of a main hive over the Winter. If things go well, you can sell it for a premium to a new beekeeper (I think that 150% normal Nuc rates is very reasonable – Overwintered Nucs have huge value) and then start your Bank the next day (the Spring Nuc.)

So, that’s my rant on Nucs. Every beekeeper should have two hives and a Nuc. That’s how to be successful and it also is a great way to help the bees by having local bees as your bank/insurance policy.

New URL!

For some time now, I have been meaning to change the domain of the site. When I first started this blog, I was doing a ton of gardening (veggies & landscaping) and beekeeping was just an extension of that hobby. Now, beekeeping has become the primary hobby for sure  (although I still do a ton of gardening!)

So, I wanted to change the domain name to more reflect what the site was about. I have finally done so. I hope all of the folks out there find their way to the new location with ease.

I have serious doubts that I will ever change it again, so I’ve finally home!

 

And so the tough season begins…

Based on the last two weeks, the nectar flow has dropped substantially in my areas (eastern Henrico and Charles City County.) I have seen a slight increase happen towards the middle of June in the past, but who knows what this Summer has in store. As I write this, we are finally getting some rain, although not the real soakers that I like. Still, hopefully this will prompt the Summer bloomers to be a bit more productive then normal. The clover has gone crazy and continues to bloom everywhere. Queen Anne’s Lace is also going to town now. Hopefully, this will provide a last shot of honey before the real tough season begins.

On the negative experience front, I lost a ton of honey in a robbing situation. I found 4 hives over the last couple of weeks with queen problems. Two of them had gone so long that the foragers had started laying, which is always a nightmare. I have been really lucky with placing a Nuc on the spot where the hive was and moving the main hive 15 feet away (or more). This has allowed me to save the primary force of bees and then, about 5 days later, combining them back with the main hive. This has worked very successfully 3 times already (I’ve had a few queen problems this year, due to all of the daggone swarming!) In my opinion, the foragers for the main hive end up coming back to the queenright Nuc and they combine naturally. Then, after a few days, the Nuc is so strong that combining them with the (now much reduced, since the foragers have moved to the Nuc) original hive is easy.

This past weekend, I did it on two hive and it cost me a ton of honey. Both of the main hives ended up being robbed substantially. I didn’t care so much about the bees (they were laying workers and only a very few nurse bees), but both hives had a lot of frames of honey that I had planned to use for the Winter Nucs. Clearly, with the flow dropping, more bees are testing the defenses of neighboring hives. This strategy is still a good one, as I did save the foragers and ended up with a fine hive building up as it should. But, I need to take the frames of honey in the future, once we get towards the end of May. Live and learn.

The other two hives I caught in time to drop a frame of eggs from one of my better hives into them and are (hopefully) now building new queens.

There are a couple of things that I have come away with from all of this. For one, my feeding will now take the conservative approach. No more feeding outside of the hives. Only feed late in the evening and only open young/weak hives late in the evening. This also means that most of my inspections now start to happen on a monthly basis, as opposed to every other week. I’ll pretty much just check supers and pull a middle frame from the brood nest to insure there is (or at least was recently) a queen. In all honesty, I have so many hives that capped brood is good enough for me. Plus, I don’t like to do full inspections when the nectar flow drops. Too much fighting when other bees are attracted by the smell of honey!

I have also decided that I will buy a voice recorder for my inspections. Most of my queen problems were easily prevented, but I simply neglected to either note it in my journal or, if I did note it (such as, hive swarmed – check for laying queen in 3 weeks), to come back and check at the right time. I have great notes from the last few years, but not as good this year. My Nuc program and trying to keep up with the honey production (as well as wife and 20 month old) have kept me so busy that I have slacked off of this important task. Again, live and learn!