Nucs | Beekeeping in Richmond, Virginia

New queens, Nicot mania, swarm cells and struggling hives

That pretty much sums up the last couple of days. This was my three day weekend and had long been planned as the weekend that I would be dropping queen-cells (from the queen rearing program) into various Nuc’s. Instead, I spent most of the weekend around the house (sometimes doing beekeeping chores, but mostly other stuff!), waiting for the temperatures to breach 50. Friday had some positives, Saturday had a lot of interesting events and Sunday was purely a prep day.

My first stop on Saturday was to check out a tree with bees in it. Friends had mentioned it last Fall and wanted me to ‘save’ them, so I wanted to see if they were still alive (and they were, so I hope to get that genetic pool in April – should be a quick extraction, but you know how that goes…) On a whim, I slipped by one of my nearby apiaries, remembering how they had swarmed on me last year and I still hadn’t gone into a single hive in that yard. When I arrived, it was like a melee of honey bees – there were so many coming and going from that line of hives that they were banging into my head as I made my initial, outside inspection. I tackled the most active one first (usually, I do the opposite) and immediately found 5 uncapped swarm cells on Medium frames. Checking the Deep below, I found the queen (yellow) and 8 frames of capped brood (about 75% full.) This hive was tearing it up!!

I went ahead and created two Nucs off of the hive, liberally shaking (two shakes each) bees into both Nucs (one a Medium, one a Deep). I put two (or maybe three) of the queen cells in the Medium Nuc and let the Deep Nuc raise their own. I replaced most of the frames with drawn frames, but did put some foundation in there to give them more room. I squashed the remaining cells. Note: I absolutely do not believe in this method of preventing a swarm. I honestly do not have time to check for cells every X days and I’m not sure it helps at all. My plan is to come back this weekend, after Easter Sunday, and look for more cells. If I find even one, I’ll pull several frames with the queen and let the hive go ahead and raise a new queen. I’ll use that queen as a backup queen for the Summer.

The rest of the hives in the apiary were more along the lines that I expect these days (a week to three weeks out from being big enough to spawn a Nuc). I did find one hive that could have used the old checkerboard method, but I didn’t have the equipment to do it (I will have it next weekend!)

The rest of the checks that day (there weren’t a lot, as I only had a few hours of decent weather) included one more hive that spawned a Nuc, several average hives and one hive that was well below average. The last one really surprised me a bit (I’ve become used to finding the average hive, the rare strong hive or the (fortunately) rarer dead out. I have not really found a ‘weak’ hive. This one was chock full of honey and only on 2 frames. She has a lot of brood on those two frames, but it’s the first hive that I have come across with less than 5 frames of capped brood (except the dead outs…) I’ll probably take action on this queen, but will let them roll into April before making any drastic calls.

Another bit of interest was the number of new queens that I discovered. I apparently had a lot of swarms last Fall and didn’t know it. Most were White or Blue queens, so it should be expected. I was happy to find the new ladies and mark them all (yellow).

Finally, I got the Nicot system off the ground and am hoping for a bunch of queens in a few weeks. Timing being like it is, I had to release the queen in the middle of a snow storm! The main bonus here was that I could see a ton of eggs in the system, which was a huge positive. I wasn’t sure she would get any laying done, given the events of the setup and capture. But, she did her thing! This year, I have two hives ready to take the cells, giving me the opportunity to raise over 40 queens. But, I’ll be overjoyed with just 20!

More Snow!!!

Wow. I spend a good part of the year looking forward to March and April. It’s Beekeeping Nirvana! Not this year, however. March has been a monster. Really cold weather (and often SNOW!) has always been in the forecast. My bees are behind, which is good, because I am behind (I’m always behind, but this year it feels like I am behind a whole month!)

Tomorrow, I had scheduled a Sustainable Beekeeping 201 class, the first in the series of sustainable beekeeping classes for more experienced beekeepers. One of the primary tasks was to create a few Nuc’s in one of my outyards. Since the weather today and tomorrow is supposed to be the same, I planned to use the temperatures today to judge whether we could hold the class (although, when I scheduled this in late February, I thought my main problem would be to find an apiary that still had hives that I had NOT pulled Nuc’s from – right now, that’s pretty much my entire fleet of hives!) At 11 am, when we would be well into building Nuc’s, it was still in the very low 40’s. Although it could be done at this temperature, I simply didn’t want to risk it. So, we postponed to the ‘bad weather date’ (which is next Saturday – this doesn’t look very promising either, but we’ll see.)

By about 2:30 PM, the temps his 50 and I journeyed out to the Westover Plantation outyard. I had not been through this outyard since February 2 (and that was just a quick inspection – pull the inner cover and a frame or two from the upper supers.)

The best news, of course, is that all of the hives were doing fine. In fact, two of them were really pouring it on. Being close to the river, I have found that these hives typically are ahead of most of my other hives (excluding overwintered Nucs). I could have easily created Medium Nuc’s from two of these hives, but instead created a single Deep Nuc off of each of them. It’s supposed to be wet (maybe with snow) and cold over the next couple of days, so I gave them both an extra shake of honey bees. Medium Nuc’s are tough enough (for me, anyway), so I hope to return in a couple of weeks and get a few Mediums off of this crowd.

Of note, I have still not seen anything to indicate that hives are in swarm mode right now. I will probably regret those words, but I currently believe that there are 2 to 3 weeks before I have to really worry about a hive swarming. Ideally, I will have reduced all of my hives by then (by spawning Nuc’s.)

I want to close on a totally different topic – reversal. That’s the practice of going into your hives in March and moving empty supers (from below) to above. You follow this up, every few weeks, with another reversal. The followers of this practice say that the bees go into swarm mode when they get to the top (as if they don’t have enough sense to realize they have plenty of space below.) I had a large number of hives with empty supers on the bottom this year. I did not reverse one. So far, every single one has done what I expected them to do – built down into the empty super. I honestly do not believe that reversal helps one bit (and probably simply stresses the bees more than anything else.)

Another Casualty and Delays

The weather has really been dealing my Nuc building plans a blow. Although we occasionally get a warm day, it always seems to be shortly followed by several very cold days. Typically, I like to have a week with the temperatures in the mid- to upper 50’s (something that is not at all unusual this time of year, typically.) They’re actually calling for temperatures to dip into the 20’s later this week, for several days. The problem is that this is not a ‘one off’. We continue to have mostly cold and/or wet weather.

For my Nuc Program, this is problematic. I started several Nuc’s in February last year, due to the expectation of a week of good weather. I’ve not had an expectation of a day or two of good weather this whole month. I’ve created a few test Nuc’s off of really strong hives, but the primary program is really getting delayed. I also believe this weather has my bees in a slow build-up pattern. I have a few exceptions that are turning it on, but the vast majority are coming out of Winter very slowly.

It’s not the end of the world, but I usually expect to turn over a bunch of Nuc’s in April (the ones that I start in early/mid-March or before.) This year, I doubt I will even have a Nuc ready in April. The hives seem to be doing fine, but everything is simply getting pushed back. I’ll be interested to find out what some of my colleagues are up to.

I also ran across another dead out. This hive was actually very strong in January. They did not run out of food, although I did see where some robbing had started. I also only found around 80 bees on the bottom board. Clearly, the ones that died did so because of a small cluster (couldn’t keep things warm enough.) This was a yellow queen… At any rate, I am running about a 7% loss at the moment (3 hives lost, 40 fully reviewed in March so far).

The only positive note are the overwintered Nuc’s. I am quite certain that one or all of them will swarm by the end of the month (and they may already be making plans for it.) When I want to feel good, I go check on them! I hope to create a few Nucs off of them next weekend, before dropping them into full Deeps. They are currently sitting in 1 Deep, under 1 Medium. All of them have just about filled the Deep (as of last weekend anyway) – I’m hoping to find them well into the Medium Nuc this coming weekend and split them off.

Whoa doggie!

Well, my enthusiasm got the best of me again! I feel like this happens every year!

The good news is that I checked 19 hives and only had one problem hive (see end of post for thoughts on this hive.) The ‘other news’ (I do not consider it BAD, but simply informational) is that I found very few walking drones and nowhere near the amount of capped drone brood that I expected. This was the first bit of news that caused me to hold off creating any Nucs yesterday. These are Nucs that will go (for the most part) to new beekeepers. The last thing I want a new beekeeper to be strapped with is a queen that is not well mated. Based on my drone findings, I should only start Nucs next weekend and really pour it on in 2 weeks.

The second observation was ‘hive build-up’. Although I did find several hives with brood on 6 or more frames, the capped brood was no more than 25% of the frames. In my opinion, I could easily create Nucs today with that kind of setup, but it would definitely set the parent hive back a lot. Basically, imagine the queen beginning to build up. It is more of an exponential process. She starts out with a few eggs one day, a few more the next day and so on. The main thing holding her back is the number of bees available to keep the brood warm during the cold nights (and days, as has been the case the last few weeks.) At some point, there are enough nurse bees to manage nearly all of the eggs that she can lay. I want to create my Nucs when we are very close to this point. So, when I remove a bunch of nurse bees for the child Nuc, the queen does not have to reduce her egg laying by too much (there are still enough nurse bees to sustain her build up.) In my opinion, my hives are 1 to 3 weeks (depending on the hive) from this point. Creating Nucs now would set the hives back by as much as a month in some cases. But, wait for some of that capped brood to hatch over the next couple of weeks and I will only be setting them back by a week or two.

It’s a good thing to set them back, as a swarm management technique, but I don’t want to set them back so much that it makes it hard to create more Nucs in the near future or puts the hive at jeopardy. That’s my philosophy anyway and the final piece to the drivers for my decision to hold off creating Nucs for the time being.

As always, the Overwintered Nucs are on a totally different playing field. They all have a good amount of drones and have filled up the bottom Deep Nuc with brood (for the most part.) They are laying on 80% of each frame and the bees are rocking. None (that I checked today anyway) have started to lay in the upper Mediums to any degree. I want them to move up into the Mediums and allow me to split them, creating a few Medium Nucs. They may swarm – we’ll see. It’s ‘experiment mode’ this year.

As to my one problem hive, it was a bit of an oddity (as always!) The hive had plenty of honey and pollen, but it appeared that the bee population was simply too small to support the brood. A lot of capped brood had dead pupae in it and I even saw some that had begun to break out of the capped cell but had apparently perished (probably on a cold night.) I could not find the marked queen, which pretty much means she is gone (I will probably try to find her again today). It was a queen from last year (yellow), so I do find it a bit odd. She actually had gotten a pretty good start within the last 3 weeks (a fair amount of capped brood) but had somehow perished during that time. There were also A LOT of small hive beetles.

The bottom line is that this hive cannot survive in the full setup it is in right now. I could combine them with a nearby, strong hive, but the SHB’s are a bit of a dissuasion here. I could also move them into a Nuc, which would be easier for them to manage, but I’d need to make sure the queen is still alive. More than likely, I will drop by the bee yard some evening when it has gotten cold, grab the whole hive and literally freeze it, bees and SHB’s all. I may then send a few bees to Virginia Tech to have a look. If I do reuse the hive, I will definitely track where those frames go in case I have a problem here. There was some odd, crystal like stuff in some of the cells that I am unable to identify (if I had used mountain camp on these gals, I’d say it was sugar, but I didn’t feed them.) We’ll see, but it is unlikely that I’ll spend much effort on them. They seem to be some genetics that I really didn’t need.

The Season Begins Tomorrow!

It is with no small amount of trepidation that I prepare for tomorrow, the first real day of my beekeeping season for this year. It’s about average, although much later than last year (due to the warm Winter) and is marked by 5 or 6 day period that starts at around 60 degrees tomorrow and rises to the mid (or even upper) 60’s over the ensuing days. It’s the perfect time to start a few Nuc’s and get some full hive checks done!

My trepidation is due primarily to the fact that I have not been in (or even laid eyes on) 90% of my hives since mid-January. Between the weather and a surprise surgery to remove my gall bladder, I simply have not been able to get out. My biggest fear is that I will find a lot of dead-out’s (dead hives.) I have been spared this consequence in all of my Winters thus far, but it seems that I always come into March with this worry. Tomorrow will be a big ‘tell’. I’ve been told that a lot of beekeepers have experienced unusually large losses this Winter. I like to think that my beekeeping practices have insulated me from this threat, but tomorrow will be the real test. We shall see.

Unless things are truly terrible, I plan to create the first Nucs of the year tomorrow. Most likely, they will all be Deep Nucs (I have not mastered the art of creating Medium Nucs this early) and I will stock them with three frames of brood and a shake or two of nurse bees. At this time of year, I stock the Nuc’s with more resources then I will later in March or even in April (you don’t need as much ‘bee mass’ once the threat of long stretches of freezing weather abates.) This is likely to put my first Nuc sales in mid-April, barring some unfortunate event.

When I go into my hives tomorrow, my first mission is to count the frames of brood. I have no idea what I am going to find, but I am looking for 6 to 7 frames of brood. If they have less, I simply mark that in my journal to help extrapolate when the hive will have the right build to spawn a Nuc. In some of these cases, I might look for the queen (mainly if it’s a hive with an unmarked queen that I want to mark.)

If the hive has the right number of frames, I will create a Nuc off of it. Mission 1 is to locate the queen and isolate her. Sometimes I drop her in a closed up Nuc box that I carry with me. In other cases, I just put her on the furthest frame in the super and grab the frames that I need for the Nuc. While counting the brood frames, I am always noting which ones have eggs, so I generally know what I need. Ideally, I’ll grab another frame that has both honey and pollen and place a frame of foundation on the far side. I literally set the Nuc up in the same yard, level it right and leave. In two weeks, I’ll come back and give them a feeder. A week later, I’ll come back to confirm that I have a queen in the Nuc. If there’s any doubt, they get another frame of eggs.

In most cases, I create a Nuc off of every hive that is ready for one. But, some hives are lower on my Good Hive Scale. Nuc’s created off of those hives are for me and, since I track my queens, I know to watch the hive for whatever bad traits that its parent had (to take action on it in the Fall).

Hopefully, my next post will be one of jubilation and not agony!

Ouch

It’s amazing how often I fail to follow my own advice…’sad’ might be a better way of putting it.

This past weekend, I held the second class in the annual Beekeeping 101 seminar that I do every year. Part of this session included a lengthy session titled ‘Managing Your Hive’ by me. There are several key points to this presentation, but one of them focuses on journals. They are very important and it is equally important to make sure you review them on occasion.

This past Sunday, I made another run of hives out in the hinterlands. Things are really looking up – hives are working on several frames (I have one hive working on 5 frames, but that seems to be the exception). When I say ‘working on’, I basically mean that the queen has brood (at some age) on the frames. This is a big ‘tell’ sign and a definite prerequisite of building Nuc’s (I want the queen to be working 7 frames before I pull a Nuc off of them.) Honey stores look good and things are shaping up nicely.

Then I gave my Overwintered Nuc’s a look…

I immediately noticed dead bees on the landing board of the 4th Nuc that I checked. Despite the fact that the loss is not going to be a big loss (in the scheme of things) it still felt like a gut punch. I pried the top off, hoping beyond hope that everything was ok. Once I got into the hive, I had the picture perfect view of a hive that was in the last throws of starvation. It was truly amazing. I literally have nearly 3 supers of capped honey in my basement alone – this doesn’t count a few supers that remain on hives (out in the ‘hinterlands’!) as bank supers. I really could not believe my eyes. I had checked all of my Nuc’s in January. I found that 2 of the ones that I created in August were light and had given both of them several Medium frames of honey. Was this one of them? Did they go through 3 frames of honey in one month?!

So, after breaking down the Nuc and prepping the frames for a quick (48 hours) freeze, I went back to the old journal to get an accurate look. And there it was… This was indeed one of my late Nuc’s. I had come to the conclusion in January that creating Overwintered Nucs in August was not early enough for me. They could get to critical mass, but they could not store enough honey for the Winter. So, I would only create them this late (in the future) if I had plenty of extra capped honey to give them. BUT, I had not gotten to this ONE hive in my January inspection. I had a clear note – check this Nuc asap – no visibility yet on the amount of stores left! I had checked all of the Nuc’s in my Nuc Yard but this one and KNEW it! But, due to life and other things, had forgotten this ‘to do’ item. Now, I have paid a painful price for it.

The truth of the matter is that ‘these things happen’, regardless of how often you might tell yourself that they don’t happen to me (this is actually the 2nd Nuc that I have had die on me due to starvation since I started doing Overwintered Nuc’s.) But, it is definitely a learning event. Starvation is something a beekeeper can prevent. Whereas I do not believe you should spend the Winter feeding your mature hives, I do believe that Overwintered Nuc’s should be fed and it’s really not a lot of work if you have frames of honey ready for them. It’s a failing on my part and I am taking steps today to prevent this from happening again in the future. To manage this, I am building a web app to track my hives and inspections here : http://www.richmondbeekeeping.com/index.php?page=testp . I hope to be finished by this weekend, at which point I can make sure that all hives are stored and tracked.

This should prevent future issues. We’ll see…

And So It Begins!

At the recent East Richmond Beekeeping meeting (held on Feb 12), one of my friends who hosts a few of my hives mentioned that the bees were on her First Breath of Spring shrub. I remember her mentioning this last year, in February I believe, and asked her to snap a picture. They arrived today! It’s great to see the little gals starting to bring in resources instead of being a total consumer, as they do most of the Winter. It’s certainly not enough to sustain the hives, but I’m certain it is getting them amped up a bit! I have already begun looking for this plant (it is also known as Winter Honeysuckle). I will probably plant 10 of them over the next few years, if I can find the space!

Although this is exciting news, we still have another few weeks of risk. I do not see much in the way of really bad weather, but you can’t rely on anything outside of 12 hours from now when it comes to the Richmond weather folks. Regardless, this was a great sign.

So, I really wanted to get out and look at a hive or two. My first obstacle was the daggone Gallbladder. That thing went south on me last week and the surgeons had to cut it out. I guess I have never had surgery like that before, but it sure is taking FOREVER to fully heal. I can walk around, but get tired really easily and can’t lift anything above 20 pounds (is there anything bee-related that weighs LESS than 20 lbs!?!) I decided to crack the only two ‘full’ hives that I have in the backyard. Both are really late Nucs (started in June) that I was only able to get a Medium super on in September. So, both remained in my backyard, which is not usual (I have a lot (well, 9 that are still alive) of Overwintered Nucs back there and like to keep full hives elsewhere!) My goal was to take off the inner cover and simply go through the Medium super, only lifting 1 frame at a time (I wish my frames had 20 lbs of honey in them, but they definitely do not.)

The first hive gave me a good show – walking drones, capped drone brood and eggs in drone cells! Walking drones is a huge find. I still have one of the February Nuc’s that I created last year and believe it is doing great, but I’m not going to do that again until I can see how long the queen in that hive really lives a productive life. But, this all but guarantees Nuc’s getting created in early March, weather permitting. It should be pointed out that the second hive had no Drones in the upper Medium and no evidence of drone brood or eggs up there. Both hives were equally strong, but one was already kicking into 3rd gear.

I am encouraged by what I found today. We’ll see what the next few weeks hold.

Winter Prep and Nucs for 2013

Well, we are moving well into November and I am definitely behind in my Winter prep. I have probably secured about 50% of the 60-some-odd hives and hope to take care of the rest tomorrow. Like every year, I am putting entrance reducers on (even though I have never tested to see if this really makes a difference), leveling the hives and doing a last honey check. The honey check has been mostly very positive, but I do have a few hives that seem to be a bit lighter than I normally have, going into the Winter. It will be interesting to see how they do. I have about 4 supers of honey collected from the Winter checks (I break hives down to 2 or 3 supers, at most.) If necessary, I’ll use them on any hives that may need it.

One thing that I am doing differently this year is using pop-cycle sticks. In each Winter check, I remove the normal stick under the outer cover (it raises it about a half an inch or more above the inner cover, providing ventilation) and putting a half of a pop-cycle stick under each corner of the inner cover. It’s a bit more work, so I’m not sure why I decided to ‘switch up’ (I’ve not had a problem with survival using the old method). In retrospect, it was probably not a good idea and I may not do it for the remaining hives.

I have definitely learned another lesson in these checks. When you go into August, make sure you have nothing but Medium supers on the hives (if you have any honey supers at all.) I ended up leaving some of my shallow supers on because of how the bees managed their living space. Although all of them were above Queen Excluders, I had to remove the excluders and most will probably end up having brood in them now. One of the benefits of having ‘brood free’ honey supers is that you can store them without much risk at all (wax moths don’t care much for wax without pollen or brood remnants (cocoons.)

Finally, I have opened up my Nuc list (click here). I notified everyone on my waiting list from last Spring (who didn’t get a Nuc) first, so they would have first shot. Right now, I probably have orders for around 13 Deeps and 15 Mediums. I will take orders for 20 Mediums and 35 Deeps before I close down the main list and move to a ‘waiting list’ only plan. Get on now, if you’re interested.

Lessons for 2012

I was recently asked by an experienced beekeeper ‘what did you learn in 2012’? I have had a lot of time to reflect on that question, as I prepare my hives for the Winter (see a brief note on that task below.)

This year proved to be a banner year in the apiaries. I created several Nuc’s in February that all became nice, strong colonies. I sold all of them but one, as I wanted to see how long the queen remained a viable later on. There are two risks with creating a Nuc so early. One is the weather – this past Winter posed no problem here. The second is the possible lack of drones. This second issue may mean that the queens from those early Nucs were not mated enough to make it as long as they otherwise might. In my mind, there is no real way to determine this except to keep the hive for three years and make sure the queen doesn’t falter early. So, no likely update on this experiment until 2015 (or earlier if it turned out to be a failure!)

I also learned that, under good conditions, you can take more than 3 deep frames from a Deep/Med setup for a Nuc without slowing them down or even stopping them from swarming. In all likelihood, I will simply create more than one Nuc from my strong hives in 2013 (I have increased my Nuc boxes by a lot, to prepare for this possibility.) The key here is to not take so much that they flounder for a month trying to rebuild. So, instead of taking more than 3 at Nuc creation time, I’ll probably take 3 one weekend and another 3 some three or four weekends later.

The painful lesson centered on supers. I will never leave 4 or more supers of honey on a hive. My banner hive (out of 30 or so honey producing hives this past Spring) drew out and capped a little under 4 supers (2 shallows and 2 mediums) of honey. I was struggling during these months, trying to keep up with my bees, and never got around to pulling the supers until sometime in June. I cannot be sure, but it appears that the hive swarmed and the queen did not make it back (another lesson here is to check for a single frame of brood at every inspection). The hive was robbed out with a bit of wax moth and SHB in it, once I got to it in June. I deal with losses pretty well, but this one hurt. I had big plans for that queen/bloodline. I was also excited about 4 supers of honey! At any rate, I now know that I can never be sure that I will get to every hive in a timely manner. So, I will be unlikely to leave more than 3 supers on a hive at any given time.

For Winter Nuc’s, I found that early August is about the latest I should start them. I tested a few in mid to late-August and they were unable to fill out the second Nuc body with honey. I’ll let them make a go of it this Winter (as a test), but I’d prefer that they had more honey (I may give one of them a medium nuc of honey from one of my bank hives.)

Winter Prep

Winter prep for me basically involves a few simple tasks, none of which require a full hive breakdown. The first thing I check is honey. I pull a few frames from the top hive body (for me, this is almost always a Medium) and make sure they have a fully capped super. The second thing that I do is spot check the bottom super by pulling one of the center frames and making sure that I have capped brood. All the while, I am looking at as many bees as I can and making sure that nothing is amiss (currently, my main way to judge this is by deformed wing virus.) I then level the hive off (in case is shifted during the year) and make sure it is slightly leaning forward. Finally, I put on an entrance reducer (and a cover, if the hive has a screened bottom board – I stopped using these but still have a dozen or so out in the yards.)

Wintering Nuc Update

We had a few hours of sun today, before the drenching arms of Issac came through and it allowed me to check my Overwintered Nucs. I started 11 for this Winter, hoping to have 8 take (strong, laying queens) and 6 make it to next Spring. One had actually perished a couple of weeks ago (I have already combined it with another Nuc.) This one started getting robbed about 4 days after I created it. Since it was nestled among 4 others, I was worried the robbing would spread, but it didn’t. I even moved the thing and gave it another frame of brood/eggs from a donor hive, only to have robbing start up again. Experiences like these indicate to me that there is some kind of a ‘scent’ issue (the Nuc simply advertises that it is weak and available for robbing.) There are many possibilities – too many for me to touch on in this post. Regardless, I was down to 10 before I even got started! What irks me the MOST is that I tried to save it, even though I know better. It seems that some habits die hard and I am simply going to throw good bees after bad, every year, regardless of my experiences.

On a more positive note, all of the remaining 10 had a laying queen as of today. Of those 10, only 2 were slight laggards. I do not judge a queen by this measure, as a lot of a queen’s laying hinges on the resources available and coming in. These two Nucs may not have had the resources available to them to really lay. But, I start feeding my Wintering Nucs on Sep 1, so they all received two mason jars in an empty hive body on top. Depending on how the Nucs were set-up, I have differing strategies now.

Four of my wintering Nucs came from one hive that I broke down. This was my absolute nastiest, meanest hive. They could handle anything mother nature threw at them, didn’t like to swarm and could put honey away like nobody’s business. But, the second I opened this hive up (with or without smoke, morning, noon or afternoon), they would literally come pouring out of the thing! I never kept track, but I am willing to bet that if you counted up ALL of the stings I have taken from my hives, this hive accounted for over 50% of the total… They were so mean that I never could find the queen when I wanted to re-queen them (I typically do this in May, for an established hive). It’s hard to find a wiley little wench when all of her sisters are jabbing you from all corners! So, I chose this hive to create my wintering nucs from. As a side tale, I never found the queen IN the hive when I broke them apart. I actually found her afterwards, on the ground in a ball of bees, outside of the entrance to the hive. I wonder if she always jumped off the frame when I came looking. At any rate, she lost a head by my hive tool on that day.

But, back to the point, since these wintering Nucs came from an established hive, they actually started with a two Nuc body setup and with a decent amount of stored honey already there. My main goal with these hives is to see them cap off the upper Nuc. Based on my (limited) experience, this is will be a slam dunk for these hives. They’ll be set before the end of September and I probably will not check them again until January.

The other 6 Nucs are in single, deep bodies. I have the same goal for this group that I had for the ones previously mentioned – get a second hive body of capped honey on top of them! I plan to do a little experimenting here, dividing the group into 3 sets of 2.

Set 1 will receive my typical strategy. They will include 2 strong Nucs that will get 2 mason jars today to get them in the ‘nectar consumption’ mode. Once they finish these jars (I’ll check all Nuc feeders every other day or so), I’ll drop a second Nuc body on them with 3 or more drawn frames and one or two frames with foundation. I’ll continue to feed them my normal syrup setup until they draw/cap the entire upper Nuc body or until the end of October.

Set 2 will receive a revised strategy. They will be treated like Set 1, but receive all foundation for the upper Nuc. I am interested to see how much wax a Nuc will draw in September. These Nucs will receive Medium upper Nucs, as I can drop capped frames from some of my Bank supers on mature hives in late October, if this experiment fails.

Set 3 includes my laggard queens. My goal here is really to simply get them to fill out a single, deep Nuc. They are starting with all drawn wax, but they will have an uphill battle (at least I think they will) because of the low number of bees. I doubt they can get a really good nurse bee set until the end of September. They simply do not have a lot of bees to build up a good Winter cluster. I could ‘rescue’ these bees with a frame of capped brood from my mature hives, but I’d like to see them make a go of it. This is really a ‘resources’ experiment for me. I am trying to find the bare minimum that I need for a good success rate for wintering Nucs. These Nucs will receive a bit more attention from me, mainly because I don’t want to open them up in the Spring and find some pest has destroyed the frames. I may also give them some capped frames later on, depending on what I see (if I open them up and find a golf ball-sized cluster, I will not be trying to save them!)