The term “nuc” is short for nucleus colony. A nucleus colony is just a very small colony of a few thousand bees and a queen. A creative beekeeper can find many ways to use one.
Nuc boxes, the structures that hold a nucleus colony, come in all shapes and sizes. Usually, you see five-frame deep boxes, but they also come designed to hold medium frames. The width varies too. I have seen two-, four-, five-, and seven-frame types, both single-story and double-story. One of my favorite nucs is a standard-size deep box with three dividers that gives you four two-frame sections, each with its own entrance. Or you can remove one or more of the dividers to make bigger sections. It all depends on what you want.
Reasons for maintaining a nuc:
- If one of your hives goes queenless, you have another queen ready to go. If you wait for your colony to re-queen itself, the population will drop such that you won’t get any surplus honey for that year.
- You can re-queen at times of the year when queens are unavailable to purchase.
- You can use the bees in a nuc to boost populations of a weak hive. If you don’t want to re-queen, you can just transfer some of the frames from your nuc into the weak hive.
In addition, having an empty nuc box on hand is useful for catching swarms or removing extra bees from an overcrowded colony.
So how do you raise queens in a nuc? The simplest way is to take a frame of brood with a swarm cell from a populous hive and put it in a nuc. The frame should have lots of nurse bees covering the brood to keep them warm. Put a frame of honey or an internal feeder next to the brood. Fill any extra space with drawn comb or empty frames, then close the lid, add an entrance reducer, and let the bees do their thing.
This works fairly quickly. You can do the same thing without a swarm cell if there are plenty of eggs or very young larvae on the brood frame. This takes a long time, however, and after a week or two you may not have enough nurse bees left to raise a good queen.
Here’s an example from my own apiary on how I used a nuc.
- Last spring I had one hive that built up early and looked like it was ready to swarm. I didn’t want it to swarm, so I took out four frames of brood. Each frame had at least one swarm cell on the bottom and lots of nurse bees covering the brood.
- I put each frame in a separate two-frame nuc and gave each one a frame of honey reserved from the year before.
- After about four weeks, I checked the nucs and found three had produced laying queens. I combined the queenless one with one of the others, so now I had three nucs.
- After a few more weeks I transferred the two-frame nucs into five-frame equipment so the colony would continue to expand.
- I kept entrance reducers in the small colonies to protect them from robbing bees and yellow jackets.
- At the end of the fall, I transferred each five-frame nuc into ten-frame equipment.
- I stacked the three nucs, one atop the other. I put the strongest on the bottom, and put double-screen boards between each nuc so the warm air from the largest colony would help to keep the smaller ones warm.
- In December, I found a dead queen on the landing board of one of my regular hives. Using a piece of newspaper, I combined one of the queenright nucs with the queenless hive. This left me with two nucs.
- As of today, the hive to which I added the queen and the remaining two nucs are all thriving.
- We still have a number of weeks to go, but if the two remaining nucs are not needed before the first honey flow, I will set each of them up as a separate hive.
As you can see, having a nuc available gives you many management options that you wouldn’t normally have. You can think of a good nuc as an insurance policy against the loss of a queen.
Rusty
Honey Bee Suite
RT @HoneyBeeSuite: [New Post] Why every beekeeper should have a nuc https://www.honeybeesuite.com/?p=3090 #beekeeping #bees
Nice post. I really enjoyed this topic. Being a new beekeeper and short on hives I feel I would need a larger population as there are no other honey bees in the local area so the number of drones would be quite low and would only come from existing hive(s).
Good topic though.
Jeff,
Are you sure there are no other honey bees in your area? A drone congregation area (DCA) may be several miles from your hive. I don’t know where you live, but many people keep their hives hidden from view so the neighbors don’t complain. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are drones closer than you think!
I still have the boxes my nucs came in from last year, but they’re made of a stiff cardboard. I’d have to shelter them from the rain (or make my own). I also have a very small back yard that will be maxed out pretty soon. I plan to make my own nucs if I can secure more land, though probably not until next year. But who knows, if one of my colonies looks ready to explode, I might start one up. I’d love to try it.
Phillip,
Hang onto those boxes, you never know when you might need something like that in a hurry. They would get you by until you had time to make something more substantial.
Both Phil and I live in the same province but live 200 km away from each other. I assume Phil is the next closest person to me with honey bees. That being said I am working on some nuc boxes and once I have 5+ hives I’ll try to make my own nucs from a couple of the full size colonies with drone comb. Beekeeping is new to our area. That being said I intend to make some splits this year but I will be buying some fertilized queens from the same source as where we get our nucs.
Next year I intend to make my own splits and let the girls make their own queen.
Jeff,
Okay, I didn’t know you were one of those beekeepers from the frozen north! You are right, buying a fertilized queen is your best bet, at least until you develop more colonies.
I am very interested in how you guys do up there because my favorite beekeeping topic is “overwintering.” I can probably learn a lot from your successes and your failures, because if anyone has winter, it is you. Keep in touch.
Next year I intend to make my own splits and let the girls make their own queen.
Ditto. Except I have don’t have any girls, just a bunch of honey bees. [Insert smiley face emoticon here.] And by next year I mean 2012. I need to get a full year under my belt before I do anything fancy. On the other hand, if I need to make a nuc from a one of my hives that is currently half buried in icy snow, I think I can pull it off.
Between now and September, it’ll be a season of firsts for Jeff and me. This time, though, I feel more prepared. The freakiest thing I experienced last year was the expulsion of drone pupae. After that shock to my system, I can pretty much take anything (I hope).
Phillip,
I’ve never seen dead drone pupae quite like that. I’ve seen them in ones and twos, but never in piles. Does your winter come on really fast with no warning? It’s interesting.
I can’t say for sure why the expulsion of the drone pupae happened. But from what I can gather from various forums and bee books, it’s not abnormal behaviour for some cold-climate bees to shut down fast and dramatically as soon as the weather begins to turn cold (this was in September). The workers will chew out remaining drone cells and discard the pupae in preparation for winter. It’s a more grotesque extension of kicking out the drones in the fall.
There may have been more drones than normal because I introduced 5 or 6 foundationless frames about a month earlier as an experiment when I added the second brood box. I was told that when given the chance to build comb their own way, a colony will usually make drones first, and lots of them (I didn’t know this at the time).
Then I read an essay (not a scientifically researched article) that claimed drones will take the hit for the colony when any kind of fungus, virus or invasive organism attacks the hive. Apparently signs of sickness will show up in drones first. The bees notice this and don’t just clear out the sickly drones, but all of them, just to be safe. Which kind of makes sense seeing how the drones aren’t vital to the immediate survival of the colony.
These are all just semi-educated guesses.
I had a local experienced beekeeper look over the drone pupae carefully, and he couldn’t find any disease. The hive slowed down big time afterwards (I thought the queen was dead), but the colony seems to doing just as well as the other one now. So whatever was going on, I guess the bees knew what they were doing.
Phillip,
I am not familiar with the essay you mentioned, but it seems to me that since drones are haploid (they have one set of chromosomes) and the females are diploid, the females may be more able to fend off disease. Since a “bad” gene is not usually expressed in individuals with two sets of chromosomes, it may be that weaknesses show up in the males more frequently than the the females. There could be evolutionary advantages to this because, as you say, the females can rid the hive of any disease the moment it first appears. In that scenario, the individuals with a single set of chromosomes take the fall for the rest of the colony–a type of early warning system.
I’ll see if I can find the essay online. I’m not sure where I read it now, but I’ll look. It was probably just the ranting of some half-baked beekeeper, but who knows.
Rusty, your take on nucs is very good. The only suggestion (constructive of course) is that I raise a queen in a nuc box from day-old eggs in a frame taken from my mother queen hive which I consider is the richest in quality, hygienic behavior strong, and the eggs have been produced during a high-energy top-quality honey flow from a protein-rich pollen and nectar source.
Epigenic studies suggest bees raised during dearth and poor protein phases gives us weakling queens and worker bees susceptible to diseases and more vigorous attack by Varroa destructor. They also like to swarm ad hoc and are often grumpy. I do not wait for a “swarm cell” from a stressed, in-swarm-mode hive, rather I take the day-old eggs from a calm, assertive, balanced environment where lots of human intervention has kept the queen civilized and her staff are never grumpy, because these bees are strong and have good aspects. A single sting is still highly potent if and when required.
Result: a calm new queen bred in a quiet, balanced nuc attended regularly by a human where the worker bees are given every opportunity to seek and play and go about their bee business with good manners connected to a predictable, regular, clean, controlled, organised, option-filled, balanced and fulfilled closet of fulfilled bees.
Animal behaviorist Temple Grandin (Animals Make Us Human): “. . . all animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain. Everyone who is responsible for animals needs a set of simple reliable guidelines for creating good mental welfare. Don’t stimulate rage, fear and panic; do satisfy the play and seeking aspects of behaviour.”
Nucs are just a brilliant way to connect with queen bees.
Marley
I would like to know all the techniques of queen production so I can be able to have a lot of nucs.
I knew the word “nuc” came from nucleus, but I just realized there may be a connection with cell division. “Nuc” has always bothered me for some reason, but with this realization, it makes a little more sense. I may be a little slow on the uptake here, and I know I have not finished my required reading, but I do not remember reading this anywhere.
Also, I don’t think you’ve added “nuc” to our word file, yet, just in case you have more to say on this.
Also, when I typed “nuc” into the search box and clicked on the “submit bee” image link [https://www.honeybeesuite.com/?s=nuc&submit.x=23&submit.y=14], I got an http 500 internal server error.
Okay, now you’ve got me upset. I recently changed internal search engines from one that gives most weight to the most recent post, to one that gives the most weight to the most relevant post. Just now I tried a number of searches: “honey”, “swarm trap”, and “hypopharyngeal” worked. “Queen” and “nuc” did not. Go figure. But thanks for letting me know. I hate spending time on the techie stuff.
As far as I know, nuc is short for nucleus, but I will see if I can dig up anything else. I, too, do not like the word.
My brother and a friend of mine both have beehives. Neither one had any honey this year. What would make that happen? What can you do to encourage more honey production next year? Both hives had plenty of bees. Thanks
Hi Colleen,
There could be a couple of things happening. For starters, first year colonies sometimes don’t store a lot of honey simply because they spend so much energy building comb and raising young. In subsequent years, much of the comb is already built, so more energy can go into storing honey. You don’t say if these are first year colonies, so this may apply or not.
When you say “no honey” do you mean no honey all, or no harvestable honey? Many times, the weather doesn’t cooperate and the bees manage to put away enough for themselves but not enough for the beekeeper. If they don’t have enough for overwintering themselves, you will have to make sure they have enough feed for winter. At this late date, that will probably mean candy boards or dry sugar.
The lack of a honey crop doesn’t mean the beekeeper did anything wrong. Sometimes the weather can be too wet, too dry, too cold, too hot–whatever–and the flowers either don’t bloom, or they bloom but can’t produce much nectar. Other years everything falls into place and you get loads of honey. I don’t know where you are writing from, but I’ve heard of severe nectar shortages in parts of Texas this year, and also parts of Massachusetts. I’m sure there are plenty of other places as well.
Hello Rusty,
Thank you so much for answering my question—the hives are several years old and are in
Mass. Maybe it was the weather. My dad raised bees for years when we were kids and we always had loads of honey so we were surprised or I should say disappointed when there wasn’t much honey. We will just have to wait until next year. Thanks again.
Colleen
Rusty,
It was unseasonably warm today where I live hitting 20°C (~72°F) and is suppose to stay in the mid teens (high 50°s, low 60°s) for most of the week. So I went and completed a quick inspection of the colonies. The bees were a little defensive but I didn’t use any smoke.
From an external standpoint the bees were bringing in a good amount of pollen today, orange, white and beige/light olive color. Would the queens still be laying this late in the year or would it be going for reserves in the spring?
So I proceeded to look in some of the colonies and noticed that there is still a good amount of frames only partially capped. These frames are pretty much full, but only partially capped.
Ideally we would prefer to have all framed capped but I assume that is still acceptable. It’s not like I can remove these frames and place something else in. I had been topping up the bees a couple weeks ago with 2:1 sugar syrup.
Also roughly each colony has one frame only partially drawn out so I moved those frames to the 1 or 10 position and moved the fully capped frames to the center.
I was amazed over the number of bees still present in the colonies. Even the 10 frame nuc was covering all 10 frames on the top. I placed my screened bottom board below the 10 frame box today so when I am ready I can move it and place it on top of the 20 frame box for winter.
Any other suggestions before going into winter?
Hi Jeff,
Queens lay eggs pretty much all year, but the rate changes drastically. The bees just maintain a small brood nest in the winter, but it’s there nevertheless. She may stop laying on occasion, but not for long.
Read today’s post regarding the capping of sugar syrup. It explains why it takes so long in the fall.
It’s sounds like you’ve done well getting ready for winter. Are you wrapping, ventilating, or quilting? Those are just some other possibilities.
Hi Rusty,
How do you keep or store frames of honey to use the following year?
I am a new beekeeper going into my third year. I really enjoy your blog.
Regards
Tom Nolan
Tom,
Wrap each frame in plastic wrap. Freeze overnight. Take the frames out of the freezer and, without removing the plastic wrap, put them back in the super. Store the entire super in a cool place away from rodents, birds, bugs, etc. It’s important to keep them wrapped so ants, beetles, moths, or whatever don’t lay eggs in them. Of course, you can keep them in a freezer, but most people I know don’t have that kind of space.
I’ve keep frames like this for three years, and when I unwrapped them, they were fine. If the honey crystallizes, it is not an issue for your bees. It just makes the honey a little like fondant, but bees have bee dealing with crystallized honey for millions of years.
Hope that answers.
I kept bees for years in sunny Bay Area, California, but now I am in far northwest Washington, in Anacortes, and I expect some new experiences as I start up again. It would be helpful if you included the LOCATION of the poster to give us some sense of how the posted issue applies to our climate.
Thanks, still learning.
Paul,
I have asked, cajoled, begged, repeated, and threatened but I cannot get folks to say where they are writing from. I sometimes look up an i.p. address to help me answer a question, but I can’t print that info if it’s not volunteered. Also, it’s not always reliable. Sorry, can’t help you with that one.
Hello Rusty. I have two hives in SW France. Both colonies are strong. One colony is quite docile but the other is very aggressive. Today I was stung on my face just because I dared to drive my tractor within 20 yards of the hive. Not an isolated incident. Equally hive management can be hair raising. Can you advise on how best to use the quiet hive to replace the occupants of the other? I’m happy to live with it for as long as it takes. Regards Robbie.
Robbie,
One way to do it would be to remove the queen from the aggressive hive, then add some frames containing eggs from the gentle hive right into the middle of the brood nest. Mark the frames so you know which ones they are. Then wait for the aggressive hive to build supersedure cells. Destroy all the supersedure cells except those from the added frames. The supersedure queens on those added frames will have genetics from the gentle queen. The genetics will be watered down because of mating, but the queen you get might be better than what you have.
Easier, I think, would be to buy a mated queen from someone.
Thanks for your prompt reply. I’ll go for option 2. Appreciated.
Robbie
Hello Rusty. I ordered a 5-frame nuc and a 3lb package of bees from different companies. My question is when I install my bees can I add a frame of brood from the nuc to the 3 lb package of bees [making sure the queen is not on the frame of brood] and if so how should I go about it? I wasn’t sure if the forage bees on the frame that I put with the package bees would find their way back to the nuc colony seeing that they haven’t oriented themselves to the new surroundings of the nuc hive. The hives will be only a few feet away of each other and I will be getting the package bees a few weeks earlier then the nuc. Or should I wait until they get oriented first? Your advise would be greatly appreciated. thank you
Terry,
I would shake the adult bees off the frame of brood to be moved and just move the brood. The foragers will go back to the original hive and the nurse bees won’t. But to limit any fighting that might occur, I would just move brood. You can do it at the same time you install your package.
Hi Rusty,
I split a booming colony last week, and checked for queen cells, and there is a ton! At least 15 over 4 frames. I would like to take 2 of those frames to make 2 nucs. You mention using a deep brood box, divided in the middle with separate entrances. So, I can do that with small entrances on the opposite sides of the front, and they will stay on their own side??? I am trying to imagine what it would look like.
I figure I would fill each side with a 1-gal in-frame feeder, 1 frame of brood + queen cell, 1 frame of empty comb (or it may have to be foundation), and one frame of honey. Sound good? If I have to do foundation instead of drawn comb, would that be ok? I’d rather not take too much from my other hives right now. They are having to build new comb too, as I just got rid of a bunch of icky old frames.
Thanks for your input!
Hi Gretchen,
Yes, you can divide the box and put the entrances at opposite ends. They will stay on their own side as long as they can’t cross over inside the box, so be really careful that your divider reaches both ends, the top and the bottom.
I think your plan sounds fine. Foundation instead of drawn comb will work, no problem. Tell us how it goes. Don’t you love all those cells?
And another question….. I just read somewhere about transporting your self-made nuc to a distant bee yard so the queen can mate with unrelated drones to increase genetic diversity. This is appealing to me, as all of my current colonies have come as splits from one vigorous hive over the past couple of years. That original queen died this winter, but my current 3 hives (soon to be 4) all are of her stock.
What do you think about that? I thought next year I’d buy a new batch to introduce some diversity, but that is next year…..
Gretchen,
Drones will not mate with members of their own hive, and they travel great distances in order to mate with virgins out of their area. In fact they travel from one DCA to another until they find the right mate. Some DCAs have been found to contain drones from more than 250 hives, coming from many miles in all directions. I suspect that driving your nucs around has limited value.
That is such great news! It saves me a lot of time I didn’t really have.
And that is really cool that they won’t mate within their own group. Those bees didn’t even have to read the genetics books to learn about the dangers of inbreeding! I love it when I learn about other animals being smarter than humans (which, of course, happens all the time with bees). It explains why even though my bees currently all came from the same queen stock, within each individual hive they range from gold to quite dark in color. I love mutts.
IS USE OF NUC HIVE IS BETTER THAN FULl HIVE TO GROWTH OF BEE?
Padma,
The size of a nuc is easier for a small colony to defend and care for, but it can inhibit the growth of the colony and may hasten swarming. When the colony begins to fill out the nuc, it should be transferred to a larger space.
Going to try to get a few nucs going to get through the winter, but can not decide if I’m better to strive for 10 frames in a deep or 10 frames in a stack of 2 nuc boxes? It seems that the deep allows a cluster more air space between the outside cold, but I’ve also lost colonies when the cluster moved away from stores. Any suggestion?
Michael,
If the colony is too big for a nuc box, I would put it in a deep.
So this is a great post. Your example is what makes the difference!
Have you seen plans for a 2 frame NUC? I’ve never seen one…
I currently have 2 swarms I captured & everything I am reading indicates I should requeen them at some point in the first year, maybe now. I live in Northern California & I’d like to raise the queens myself & have other thriving hives. What would you recommend I do with the swarms here in mid july? I am feeding them syrup, they are building out well.
Steve,
I’ve never seen plans for a two-frame nuc. I have a couple I bought from Brushy Mountain Bee Farm but I don’t think they carry them any longer
I think I would keep a July swarm in a standard nuc, unless they grow fast. Then I would transfer them to a stardard brood box. The colony I have in my only top-bar hive is one that moved in on a July day in 2010. They are still going strong, so I never write-off a July swarm.
Hi Rusty, I’ve been trying to figure something out. I did a split this year in an attempt to preserve the genetics of a survivor colony (a hive left completely unattended for over 4 years). It made about 20 cells on two frames, so I then split those up into two and added nurse bees & fully capped brood to the new box. The original split that had the same bees in it that made the queen cells began chewing out the q-cells from the sidewall one by one. There was no queen present and no laying worker. Getting frustrated, I fashioned a cage to put around the last 2 cells and waited. One of them had been infiltrated and chewed out. The other one emerged. The queen that did survive is small, and I’m wondering if they are going to supersede her at some point. Hopefully she’ll make it through the winter.
I’ve never seen a q-less hive destroy every queen cell they themselves made. I wondered if it was because there were zero drones and maybe they thought a new queen could not mate, so they destroy them. But, you replied to another post that queens and drones from the same hive do not mate. So, do you have any insight of why this colony would have done this?
Alice,
Maybe you had a virgin queen in there. It’s usually a virgin queen that chews in through the side of queen cells.
So grateful for your website and the wealth of information you share. I recently caught a swarm of bees and was curious about your thoughts of leaving them in their current home (a five frame nuc) and add additional nucs approximately 3 in total as I I’ve been told bees will build faster up than out. Your thoughts.
Les,
The thing to consider is overwintering. A tall skinny hive will lose more heat faster.
Hi Rusty – I have a few ideas about starting nucs and I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’ve been making nucs for a few years without taking the queen from the mother hive – just a frame of capped and uncapped, frame of nectar, frame of pollen and an empty frame. It’s been working out well. I hear over and over that you have to move your split or nuc to a distant location because the bees will simply fly back to their original hive. This makes sense if you put foragers in your nuc. However, although you can’t always exactly shake off ALL of the foragers, I’ve been making my nucs with the bees that cling to the frames which would presumably be a majority of nurse bees who’ve theoretically never left the hive, never oriented to the hive’s location. Here’s the thing – when I make my nucs, I place them at most 5-10′ from the original hive because I don’t have the luxury of taking them further. Since the bees in the nuc are predominantly nurse bees, they don’t leave the nuc and a new queen is developed. A commercial beekeeper who spoke at our Philadelphia symposium thought I was deceiving myself if I thought that nurse bees never left the hive before and wouldn’t return back to the original hive. I don’t see how that’s possible – young bees don’t leave the hive until foraging age. I’ve had good luck for a few years. What are your thoughts on the idea that you don’t have to move a split or nuc far if you think it contains predominantly nurse bees, those bees that cling to the capped and uncapped brood? Also, I’ve heard it said that walk-away splits will generally produce weaker queens – I think it’s possible one of the downsides to method is that foragers aren’t bringing in pollen and nectar, but that can be remedied by providing adequate pollen and nectar frames and in a few days, the nurse bees become foragers after all. What are your thoughts on development of a queen in this way?
Thanks for all the great info! Learning so much from all the comments and responses.
Rusty,
Is it too late to induce queen rearing to form a couple of nucs going into the winter?
Earlier this season I tried for the first time and was successful with splitting some colonies which in turn raised their own queens. I also moved frames with queen cells (along with brood and nurse bees) to create another two colonies. They all developed well are currently full colonies. Now going into winter I have a particularly good hive (which I used to create some of the splits) with a queen finishing her second season of egg laying. She is still doing well but I’m concerned about her ability to make it through one more winter as well as build up the colony for next spring. I probably should have planned for this a little earlier, but is it too late to induce queen cell rearing from this hive (with its nice queen genetics), mating, and setting up some small nucs to have on hand for winter with backup queens, or next spring for starter colonies? I’m in the Pacific Northwest. I’m still seeing plenty of drones in and around the hives. -Bill
Bill,
You could probably swing it if you keep an eye on things and do a lot of feeding.
I live in Toronto, Canada, and keep my bees at a cottage a couple of hrs north. I want to overwinter two nucs so I can utilize them in the spring. I started two 4-frame nucs with queens and bees that I caught as swarms this spring. I introduced new queens into the existing hives.
Temp. currently, vary from 70 to 90 deg F. It will start getting colder in October. I have an insulated 5-frame nuc box and am wondering if I can transfer the 4 frame nuc into the 5 frame box in October for overwintering.
Nick,
I don’t see why not. Sounds like a good idea.
I’m in the East Bay Area of California (hot, dry, most of the time, mild and short winters). I’ve spent two seasons being mentored (1st year heavily, 2nd year less so) and am now launching out completely on my own – during a pandemic no less making it harder to get mentors to come look at my set-up! I’ve found your website to be extremely helpful and easy to read, so thank you very much!!
A quick question…you stated above “One of my favorite nucs is a standard-size deep box with three dividers that gives you four two-frame sections, each with its own entrance. Or you can remove one or more of the dividers to make bigger sections.” I really like this idea and would like to do the same thing. How do you keep the bees separate when the entrances are all lined up next to each other? My last mentor (a small-scale commercial beek) used divided Nucs with entrances on both sides of the box as you’ve also mentioned above, but I don’t see how I can do that on a standard deep-box set-up unless I’m just putting the box on something other than a standard bottom board. What am I missing?
Kelly,
The boxes I’m referring to (also call queen castles) have one entrance on each side of the box. Four compartments, four sides, four entrances.
Hello,
I was wondering if I could put a 5 frame established nuc into a 4 on 4 frame double nuc before I install it in a full ten frame brood box? My reason being last year we had 28 degree nights the second week in May here in New York and I thought the 4 on 4 double nuc would hold the heat until warmer weather to transfer in full-size brood boxes. What are your thoughts on this?
Thank You
Joseph
I think it should work just fine.
Thanks, Rusty
You mentioned merging a nuc with a full-size queenless hive using the newspaper method. Can you elaborate a bit more on exactly how you do that? I’m sure I’m overthinking it. I have a 2-deep hive that has failed to raise a new queen and I have a 5 frame NUC I’d like to drop on it. My nuc box is a single unit, so I need to pull the frames out.
Option 1 – Pull 5 frames out of the top box and set the 5 nuc frames in their place
Option 2 – Shake all the bees down into the bottom box, newspaper it, then put the 5 frames in the top box and let them merge.
Option 3 – Cage the queen first and then introduce the 5 frames.
Matthew,
See “How to Combine Colonies with Newspaper” I would make sure all the brood is in the bottom box along with most of the nurses. Then add the newspaper and set the second box on top. Put the nuc in that second box. Sort of like Option 2, but keep the brood nest together.
Can you proivde a picture of your favorite nucs using a standard-size deep box with three dividers that gives you four two-frame sections, each with its own entrance. Sounds good. How do you make these diviiders to give separate entrances. A picutre is worth a thousand words.
Kelly,
See a picture here: https://midnightbeesupply.com/product/queen-castle/
Last year I used 2-frame mini nucs to hold queens and bees as resource hives. They worked great as I needed to boost weaker hives.