2-queen set up for nucs

[NickM]

I have 2 nucs which are going well and bringing in a load of nectar, and both need a super. I was planning to set up a shared super for them, like Mike Palmer's system where the 2 nucs access a joint super, each through their own queen excluder. This is partly because I dont have enough nuc supers to give them one each, and also because it just seems a neat idea to share the foraging resource.

However I have not yet found a queen in one of the nucs. A while back they had a had raised a queen, then she went missing (possibly eaten on a mating flight), I gave them a test frame and they raised abundant queen cells. I knocked these back and introduced a frame of eggs and young brood from a good queen, but they have not raised any queen cells on this second frame. My guess is that I missed a queen cell on the test frame and they have a virgin queen in there somewhere, not yet at point of lay, hence the lack of interest in the frame of eggs.

So my question is this.

Is there any risk in giving these 2 nucs a shared super before I am sure there is a laying queen in both? At the moment I have just closed then both up while I go and ponder and ask advice.

 

[Michael Palmer]

Double nucs with a shared super have an issue with requeening. They won't. If one side decides to change their queen,
or you do, it will fail every time. Once you add that common super above an excluder, the double nuc becomes one colony.
The colony has a queen, and won't accept another.

 

[NickM]

Thank you Michael; very useful advice. I shall wait for the queen before I set up the double system.