This week I will be making nucs by doing some late season splits of my colonies. Living in the North, time is running out for this type of management strategy to increase your total number of hives. Normally I would do this around July 15, but I am running late this year.
Nucs
What is a nuc? Basically, it is a separate hive, usually smaller with typically 5-6 frames per hive body. The main advantages are using less equipment and creating a less stressful environment for the bees. Using less equipment is desirable because you are creating a brand new colony and it does happen where the queen is not accepted or not mated well.  Using the smaller nuc equipment lets you use more resources towards your established production colonies until you know whether or not your nuc is going to be a successful hive. A smaller cavity that the nuc provides allows the smaller number of bees to better regulate the conditions inside of the hive, therefore providing a less stressful environment.
Every one should have some nucs in their apiary. They are a great way to maintain the number of colonies in your apiary, propagate the genetics of your high-performing queens, keep a queen on hand for emergencies, or produce extra nucs for sale all while minimizing the amount of equipment necessary for a typical hive.
What’s the Big Deal About Nucs?
Creating nucs helps to control Varroa Mites. The brood break caused by the lack of a laying queen disrupts the mite’s breeding cycle. While waiting the 4-5 weeks for a new round of brood to be capped, the mites are so desperate to lay eggs that they will all converge on the limited number of brood oftentimes killing the pupae in the process. This will cause the adult bees to clean out the cells which further disrupts the mite’s reproductive cycle. The 4-5 weeks of no new, baby mites also helps the bees reduce the mite numbers through their natural grooming behavior. Bees get groomed off, but no new mites are being born to replace them.
There are a few different ways you can provide a new queen for late summer/early fall splits:
- Graft the queens yourself and insert the new queen or ripe queen cell into the queenless nuc.
- Purchase a mated queen and introduce her to the new split
- Let the split make it’s own queen.
The last option is the most controversial, so of course that is going to be the way I split my colonies this fall. I hear SOOOO many arguments against letting the bees raise their own queens. Hey, whatever works for you and your apiaries, please feel free to continue doing it your way. Personally, “walk away” splits have been very successful for me and my bees. It ensures I am getting the genetics from the bees that I want, and I don’t have to spend the precious little time I do have by:
- grafting
- creating a Cell Builder
- buying/maintaining Queen Castles
- transferring queens to their new homes
Let’s Make a Nuc!
For those of you who think that you can only get inferior queens by the Emergency Queen Rearing Method the bees will be doing, I disagree. There have been many experts, far wiser than I, who have studied this subject and have found that when you give the bees the tools that they need then they will produce a good quality queen.
Now, I have a few hives that have produced AMAZING honey crops this year, are absolutely loaded with bees, and have a very gentle disposition. Not to mention they survived this past winter. These hives did not swarm this year, so they are working with a 2nd year queen. I don’t want to risk losing these genetics over the upcoming winter, so I am forced to split them a little later than I normally would.
Let me explain how I am doing my late Summer splits this week.
- I move a colony that I am NOT splitting. This is where I will be placing my nuc. This way, the returning field force from the colony I moved will greatly increase the nuc’s numbers. Moving colonies is a little easier for me since I place my hives on a pair of 4’x8’s resting on cinder blocks. This allows me to slide a colony over to make room for the nuc.
- I pick a colony that is an excellent honey producer, grows quickly, and has a decent temperament.
- In the nuc goes 2 frames of honey and 1 frame of pollen (if available).
- I EVENLY split up the brood frames between the parent colony and the nuc, ensuring that each has at least one frame with some eggs in it.
- Sometimes I make a little notch in the wax underneath some of the eggs, a la Mel Disselkoen’s method. This allows a little more room for the bees to make room for the peanut shaped queen cell. Not necessary though.
- Replace the frames from the parent colony with drawn frames and use drawn frames to fill out the boxes in the nuc.
- That’s it! Check on the nuc periodically to make sure it has room to grow.
I am sure that in the future I will be trying my hand at one of the grafting methods available. But, for now, walk away splits into nucs work very well for me. I have produced queens in this manner that are prolific layers and make a surplus honey crop for me to harvest. I also get to have more control over the genetic traits in my apiaries.
How do some of you increase your colony numbers? Do you keep nucs in your apiaries? Let me know in the comments section below.
Bee Safe.