Questions about nucs.

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Hazem

New Bee
Joined
Jun 3, 2009
Messages
28
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Location
London, uk
Hive Type
National
Number of Hives
9
Hi,

Some of my colonies are strong and doing well. I am planning to make some nucs. I will be using 2 store and 3 brood frames.

Now I need to know:

1- When is the best time to form the nucs?
2- Can I mix the frames (with or without the bees) from different colonies?
3- Is it late to let them make their own queens? or it is better to introduce mated queens this time of the year?

Your thoughts, ideas and suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks,

Hazem
 
Hi,

Some of my colonies are strong and doing well. I am planning to make some nucs. I will be using 2 store and 3 brood frames.

Now I need to know:

1- When is the best time to form the nucs?
2- Can I mix the frames (with or without the bees) from different colonies?
3- Is it late to let them make their own queens? or it is better to introduce mated queens this time of the year?

Your thoughts, ideas and suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks,

Hazem

the problem this time of year is getting them big enough to get through winter....if you just put three frames with eggs in now it will be the lst week in august before you can really have a laying queen...just a few weeks for her to lay winter worker bees

use their natural swarm instinct in spring, crowd them and feed them then split them

mix frames, not recomended but yes, spray the bees with sugar water with lemon grass oil in it even use super frames as stores
 
First obstacle at this time of the year is wasps. Might, or might not, be a problem.

Regards, RAB
 
Best and easiest time is early swarming season: April - May. When they decide to swarm, they build about 10 or 12 queen cells, frequently more. Thus when you do your artificial swarm, you can choose to split the "unswarmed" part as many times as you have brood frames for. We split each of ours into two (+ the artificial swarm itself), thus going from 2 hives to 6. We should have split them more, because two of them swarmed out. Most of the splits are now thumping colonies, some are on their second super. Trying to split this late is cutting it fine for the winter, but you will probably be OK in London - the temperature in October/November will still have the bees out and foraging, if there is anything to forage.
 

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