I propose to make my own insulated mating NUC's and set them up in the same way that I would apidea. My home made nuc will still accommodate 3 frames which will be half the length of a National brood frame and be approx 2/3 the depth so allowing for a larger nest and will at a later stage be easily transferable to an insulated standard 3 frame Nub and onto National frames.
Hi Tommo, just a few thoughts which you may possibly find interesting. We've been doing similar over the last few years, with some operational differences.
Firstly, we started from a ten inch top-bar baseline. The only reason for this choice was that it allowed a level of inter-change with the 'mini-plus' mating nucs which we were already using.
Insulation wasn't used -with the exception of a simple slab of kingspan placed on top of the boxes as a roof. Most of the boxes, to keep costs to a minimum, were in fact made from OSB3 (don't believe the people who will insist that OSB3 isn't suitable for outside use. Some of our boxes have been outside constantly for three years without any sign of failure). Would they have done better with insulation? Maybe, but I can't see how; results so far have been inseparable from those of our existing poly mini-plus boxes. However, what you build your boxes from is personal choice, if you've designed an insulated box already then there's no valid reason not to take that road.
Three frames are the minimum I like to use to start a unit (of any size), it's not the three combs that matter as much as the two seams. That's what I think anyway. However, Our boxes were designed to hold six frames as that allows for easier management in a real world environment where I sometimes have to be away from home when I should be looking after the nucs. Also, here on the
south coast units consisting of five or six of these frames overwinter really well.
We have cut out combs and tied them into larger frames with great results BUT our preferred method is to hold some larger boxes in reserve which take 12 or 13 mini frames; these allow the chosen mating nucs to be further built up before adding a second nuc box designed to take full size frames which they're then allowed to build into. The end result of this is a standard nuc and a box of mini combs to split into new mating nucs.
edit: An observation. We quickly moved to a deeper frame while maintaining the the ten inch top-bar. Most of our mini-plus hives which are based on the idea of half length md shallows frames now (as of this year) have a wood extension at the bottom so that they can also take the deeper frames). I personally think that it's preferable to have bees on deeper comb where possible although many will of course think differently.
The main point of these little colonies is that they should be self sustaining from one year to the next so that we don't need to faff around re-stocking each spring.
