Category Archives: Nucleus colonies

Mini-nucs: tips and tricks

Leave a Reply

Synopsis : More discussion of modifying and maintaining mini-nucs for queen mating; judging queen quality, repeat queen mating, season’s end and overwintering mini-nucs.

Introduction

A couple of weeks ago I described some of the basics of using mini-nucs for queen mating. I’ll try and avoid overlaps with that post in the following discussion of ‘tips and tricks’, effectively a rag-bag collection of stuff I failed to cover last time, interspersed with some typical problems that might be encountered.

Inevitably some of the discussion will be about specific modifications to the particular mini-nucs I use (Kieler or Warnholz polystyrene mating nucs). I settled on these because I needed a dozen one season, I had zero experience in using any so had nothing to compare and I couldn’t afford Apidea’s.

Kieler mini-nucs: four topbar frames and an integral feeder

Overall I’ve been reasonably satisfied with the choice my younger, poorer 1 and (even more) ill-informed self made. Over a decade later I’m using the same mini-nucs and I’ve not been tempted to try anything else 2.

Nevertheless, despite a Kieler-centric flavour to some of the comments below, most still apply directly (or with a little finagling) to other makes of mini-nuc.

Finally, I’ll repeat the point I made last time … mini-nucs are ’high maintenance’. They are not ’fit and forget’ beekeeping. Unless placed in the shade they may well abscond on a lovely day 3. Late in the season, without care and attention, they can get robbed out by wasps in hours. If there’s no nectar flow they will need feeding.

But, looked after carefully, they can be an efficient way to get queens mated .

Painting and decorating

Any poly hive needs painting to protect it from UV degradation. Most of my mini-nucs were first painted with el cheapo masonry paint. This has a matt finish and has been reasonably hard wearing.

More recently, I’ve started painting – or overpainting – them with Hammerite garage door paint. This is an oil or solvent based gloss paint. It causes the surface of the polystyrene to melt (very slightly) and therefore bonds extremely well. The Swienty brood boxes I painted several years ago look as good now as they did then. The Hammerite paint comes in a range of colours, including a rather nice green or blue.

Hammerite Oxford blue, since you asked

Successful queen mating needs reasonable weather (and patience). However, it also needs the returning mated queen to successfully find the mini-nuc she set out from. It therefore makes sense to either place the mini-nucs in separate and distinctive locations, or (perhaps that should be and/or) to paint them in distinctive colours.

Red ‘Wilko’ masonry paint and ‘bin end’ yellow gloss

I tend to place mine in pairs and so often have a plain and coloured one on the same stand, facing in opposite directions to further help the queen discriminate between entrances.

Entrances and exits

Kieler-type mini-nucs have a rotatable entrance with three or four options – blanked off, ventilation, a queen excluder or fully open. I shouldn’t need to mention that, if there’s a virgin queen in the hive (that you want mated), the entrance must be fully open.

But I will 😉

Entrance discs for mini-nucs

You can purchase replacement entrance disks like those in the photo above from a range of suppliers (or eBay, which is significantly less expensive). Using these may help queens return to the correct mini-nuc after orientation or mating flights.

Oops, almost forgot … bees have a tendency to nibble away at the polystyrene around the entrance of these Kieler nucs (or at the ‘under entrance’ which I’ve never used) while confined. It’s therefore worth painting the entrance tunnel as well as the outside.

Crownboards

Apidea’s and several other mini-nucs I’ve looked at are sold with clear semi-rigid plastic crownboards. Some have integral flaps for adding the queen cell or feeding the mini-nuc without letting clouds of bees escape (admittedly small clouds, as they’re only primed with a few hundred millilitres of bees).

Kieler’s are sold without a crownboard. Don’t let that put you off. A thick piece of clear plastic works just fine as a crownboard and you can easily engineer (i.e. cut) a small flap to add the queen cell between the topbar frames. I use a small piece of tape to hold in down.

Plastic crownboard. Note flaps for adding the queen cell and (above the feeder) adding syrup

You can put an additional small flap above the feeder that allows you to add syrup without any bees escaping. This only needs to be a few millimetres square and doesn’t need taping down. Even if you don’t think you’ll be feeding syrup – which you do using a small funnel – this modification takes seconds and won’t be in the way (but you’ll be glad it is there if you need it).

Hold the crownboard in place with drawing pins. That way there’s less chance it will blow away should you open the box on a windy day. It also means the crownboard stays stuck to the brood body, rather than being removed with the tightly-fitting roof.

Feeder mods

The Kieler integral feeder has some good and bad points.

It’s a good size, so reducing the chance of the mini-nuc starving if left for an extended period. However, this inevitably cuts into the space available for bees and brood, meaning that retention of the feeder can lead to rapid overcrowding.

You win some, you lose some!

The feeder is easy to remove and only fits in one orientation. Irritatingly it is too deep to fit into the ‘second storey’ extension (see below). It also has no cover or queen excluder and the queen can sometimes end up in the feeder, particularly if the bees build comb there.

Feeder with queen excluder

I therefore usually fit a small rectangle of plastic queen excluder, balanced on map pins stuck into the inner walls of the feeder. This stops the queen entering the feeder, but doesn’t necessarily stop the bees building comb there.

Be thankful for small victories … 😉

If you need more brood space you can easily replace the integral feeder with a homemade frame feeder designed to feed fondant. I build these shorter than the integral feeder so that they can be used interchangeably in the ‘second storey’ extension.

Kieler frame feeders

These work well, cost pennies to make and can be quickly exchanged when needed. When I’ve overwintered queens in these mini-nucs I’ve always used these fondant frame feeders in the upper storey, with frames filling the entire lower level. This reduces disturbance when you need to feed them.

Frames

The Kieler is a mini-topbar hive. Each topbar has a longitudinal slot cut into its underside designed to take a strip of foundation. They also have a ‘pinched’ central area, so that a queen cell can be easily inserted between two adjacent bars.

The bars themselves are just 15 x 8 mm softwood. Purchased separately they cost 36 p each (Yikes! … and those don’t even appear to have the central pinched indent).

If you need more (and you will … to replace losses and for the the upper storey should you buy one) just make your own with some wood from the store, a metal ruler, a Stanley knife and some antiseptic cream and Elastoplast.

And, while you’re at it, don’t go fiddling about with little strips of foundation held in place with melted wax. I did this for years. They work perfectly well, but they are fragile. The foundation in unused topbar frames will get bent or broken, and then you’ll have to start all over again.

Instead, eat as many Fruit Splits, Rocket lollies or Twister’s as you can stomach 4 and keep the sticks. Split these lengthwise and glue them into the longitudinal slot in the Kieler topbar using normal wood glue and 5 never re-wax them again.

Kieler mini-nuc topbar frames – no need for foundation or waxing

And, no, you don’t need to cover them in melted wax or anything else. All the bees need is a guide to help them draw the comb in the right place.

I’m sure there’s stuff I’ve forgotten about, but that lot will do for the moment. Let’s move on to four specific practical aspects of using mini-nucs.

Judging queen quality

You can’t … or at least I can’t.

I don’t think you can meaningfully determine the quality of the queen in a mini-nuc. The time between when she starts laying and when she runs out of comb is sometimes too short to even check whether she’s producing worker brood.

I usually leave her in the box until there’s some capped worker brood present and then – ideally – move her to a 2-5 frame nucleus colony. At the same time I clip and mark her. As long as she’s laying one egg per cell (and she sometimes starts laying more than this, but should slow down after a day or so) and the brood develops into worker brood then things should be OK.

However, it’s not until she’s laid a full frame or three of brood that you can judge the laying pattern (remembering that the laying pattern may also depend upon the bees in the box with her).

Brood frame with a good laying pattern

Furthermore, to properly judge her you need to observe the behaviour of the bees that develop from the eggs she lays.

Are they well tempered? Are they steady on the comb? Do they have the other traits you are keen to promote? Frugality? Good pollinators? Preferential collection of avocado nectar (Afik et al., 2010).

OK, perhaps not the last of those, but you’d be surprised about the traits some beekeepers favour.

Queen introduction

I remove the mated queen from the mini-nuc, place her in a JzBz cage without attendants and introduce her in the usual way to a queenless full-frame nucleus colony; I leave the sealed cage hanging between frames overnight and – assuming there are no signs of aggression to the caged queen – I remove the plastic cap and leave the workers to eat their way in through the fondant-plugged entrance/exit tube.

If there are signs of aggression, leave it another 24 hours.

Checking for aggression

A well designed introduction cage has some protection for the queen so she can avoid aggressive workers that can otherwise damage her feet. I’ve had considerable success with the JzBz cages (and happen to have inherited a bucket full and so don’t use anything else 😉 ).

I’ve inadvertently left a queen trapped in one of these cages for 6 days with no ill effects. Don’t rush things.

Rear some spares

What do you think happens with commercially reared queens, many or most of which are mated from mini-nucs?

Exactly … nothing, other than being popped into a shipping cage and having a £40 price tag attached.

In contrast, you have the opportunity to check your queens more thoroughly.

Rear a few more than you need, check out their performance, keep the best and donate the unwanted to one of the many, many beekeepers clamouring for queens – particularly late in the season. Even the also-rans are likely to be OK 6. Not necessarily great, but more than good enough to get the colony through to the next season 7.

Queen rearing diary; automagically populates days and events

And finally, make sure you keep good records. The first couple of times you do this you’ll think you will be able to remember the key points the following year; the dates of emergence, the time it took to have mated queens, the origin of the queen cell used to prime the mini-nuc etc.

But you probably won’t. The notes will be very useful for planning your queen rearing the following season.

Keeping things going

Populating mini-nucs early in the season is often a thankless and unpleasant task. The weather is cool, the bees are tetchy and – as described a fortnight ago – you may have had to shake through the colony twice to get the young workers.

That’s not the sort of task I like to repeat if I can possibly avoid it.

If you’re rearing queens all through the summer you can simply remove one mated queen and, shortly afterwards (within a few hours), add a new mature queen cell. This is the ideal situation and, with good organisation, good weather and good mating success, you can get three or four queens out of a single mini-nuc in one season.

Mainly good organisation.

You need to ensure you have a succession of mature queen cells ready at the about right time, remembering that queen mating often takes longer than expected (or wanted).

Scrub ‘caretaker’ queens

If that’s not possible, or if you want (or have) to interrupt queen cell production (e.g. your queenright cell starter swarms or a round of grafting fails) you can remove the mated queen from the mini-nuc and allow the bees to rear a ‘scrub’ queen.

A well populated mini-nuc will readily do this. The resulting queen is usually a bit on the small side, but she will keep the worker population ticking over and ready to accept a new mature queen cell in due course. In addition, the enforced brood break while they rear the scrub queen helps prevent the mini-nuc from getting too overcrowded.

These ‘caretaker’ queens are reared under the emergency response and – assuming there are suitable eggs in the little colony – emerge about 15 days after you remove the mated queen (remember, the bees preferentially choose 3 day old eggs to rear queens under the emergency response). A fortnight or so later the queen should be mated and laying. This approach therefore means you can take 4-6 weeks off if needed.

The end of the queen rearing season

What do you do with the contents of the mini-nuc after you’ve taken the last of the mated queens out? The little hive may well be bursting with bees, with all 4-6 combs containing brood.

Many beekeepers shake the bees out in front of a strong hive. The majority of the workers will be accepted, but the brood is wasted.

To avoid this I’ve used ‘zip’ ties to secure two Kieler topbar frames into a standard brood frame. At the very least these can be placed into a full sized hive for the brood to emerge. Usually, by the time of year I get round to this the bees have stopped drawing comb. Once the brood has emerged I move the frame to the side of the brood box and remove it.

Dave Cushman has details of some clever frame modifications that allow Kieler-type (he calls them Kirchhain mating hives) frames to be drawn at the beginning of the season and used to accommodate brood-filled frames at the end.

Unsurprisingly, when I’ve done this it’s been a lot more ’Heath Robinson’. The Kieler topbar frames are a little too long to fit end-to-end in a National frame. I therefore built some with a scrap 8 mm thick spacer (shown in black below) tacked under one side of the frame. I then use zip ties to hold everything more or less in place.

Using mini-nuc brood frames

Despite being a total bodge this has generally worked well. I’m pleased not to waste the brood.

Now I know the air freshener trick (described in this 2020 post) I’d probably just add the frames as shown in the diagram above together with the adhering bees, and give them and the recipient colony a quick blast of ’Sea breeze’ before uniting them.

Overwintering mini-nucs

Alternatively, with a little care you can overwinter queens in mini-nucs. This saves you the faff of emptying them at the end of the season, and means they are ready for queen cells the following year (after removing the queen of course) 8.

I’ve overwintered queens successfully quite a few times but certainly don’t consider myself an expert at it. There’s quite a high attrition rate. Remember how small these colonies are, how limited the space is for stores and the relatively small population of bees present to stop the colony freezing in the winter.

I think every mini-nuc I’ve overwintered successfully has been a double-decker, with the standard Kieler brood box underneath an additional extension brood body. These almost double the volume of the mini-nuc.

The mini-nuc needs to be strong in mid/late autumn, almost certainly boosted by combining the contents of two separate mini-nucs. You can unite them over paper in the same way you’d treat a full sized hive.

Unfortunately, the upper and lower brood boxes have different depths, so comb drawn in the bottom box needs to be trimmed to fit in the upper box. A messy and irritating task.

I replace the lower integral feeder with additional brood frames and place one or two fondant frame feeders in the upper chamber – usually one at either end to ensure the mini-cluster is near to one of them.

Place the box somewhere sheltered, leave the entrance open to allow the bees to fly for cleansing flights and cross your fingers …

Gimme shelter

I’ve not overwintered mini-nucs since returning to Scotland, though I know several beekeepers here who do this successfully. In the Midlands we often had quite harsh winter weather – certainly much colder than we usually get here on the north-west coast of Scotland.

Two double decker mini-nucs overwintered successfully in an unheated greenhouse

A decade ago, well before my bee shed experiments, I was successfully overwintering mini-nucs in an unheated greenhouse with entrance tunnels from the hive to the outside. These worked surprisingly well and got queens through some really hard weather (note the snow in the picture above – late March 2013).

Tunnel entrances to overwintered mini-nucs

If the winter was particularly severe I would cover the mini-nucs with a thick layer of bubble wrap to try and retain as much warmth as possible. The levels of stores needs to be checked regularly, particularly once brood rearing starts in earnest. These little colonies can starve surprisingly quickly 🙁 . It takes seconds and causes minimal disruption to swap out those fondant frame feeders.

With a little luck and the normal amount of good judgement it was sometimes possible to remove the overwintered queen to make up a nuc in mid/late April, replacing her with a queen cell from the first round of grafting.

Of course, it rarely worked quite as smoothly as that … 😉 9

Finally

The one thing I would not recommend you try is allow the mini-nuc to build up to a full-sized nuc without supplementing it with additional brood and bees. A mini-nuc is too small and it will take too long rearing a few hundred bees at a time to make even a five frame nuc. I’ve tried and it’s a waste of effort.

References

Afik, O. et al. (2010) ‘Selection and breeding of honey bees for higher or lower collection of avocado nectar’, Journal of Economic Entomology, 103(2), pp. 228–233. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1603/ec09235.

Mini-nucs: the basics

18 Replies

Synopsis : Mini-nucs are a good way to get queens mated. They are inexpensive, use few resources and are relatively straightforward to use. This post describes the basic features and use of mini-nucs for mating in miniature.

Introduction

Mini-nucs are the small hives some beekeepers use for queen mating.

Pedantically, queen rearing could be considered the generation of queen cells with – in due course – the production of virgin queens. However, it’s a rather pointless exercise if it’s not also followed – in pretty short order – by queen mating.

A queen needs the support (and probably encouragement!) of a colony of some sort while she becomes sexually mature, goes on her orientation and mating flights, packs her spermathecae and then starts laying eggs.

The hive can be anything from a full-sized double-brood colony, possibly containing over 40,000 bees, to a container no larger than two egg boxes primed with 300 ml (perhaps no more than 1000) of bees.

Kieler mini-nuc

Clearly, dedicating a full colony for queen mating (unless she is destined to stay in the same box of course) is resource-intensive and impractical. For this reason most beekeepers who rear more than a very few queens will use smaller hives for queen mating.

Even using 4-6 frame nucleus colonies for queen mating is very demanding of resources; each needs to be started with a frame or two of emerging brood and the adhering bees and a frame of stores, possibly with some additional bees shaken in on top. Getting half a dozen queens mated in these ‘full-sized’ nucs might requires ‘gutting’ two complete colonies 1.

But you don’t need to use a full-sized nuc … with care you can scale things down … a lot.

How mini is a mini-nuc?

When I started beekeeping the hive choice for queen mating was either a ‘full-size’ 5 frame nuc or the mini-nucs manufactured by Apidea or Kieler (the latter are sometimes sold as Warnholz mating hives).

Apidea mini-nuc

I’ve used Kieler’s for years. They are the only type I own … largely because they were appreciably cheaper than Apidea’s. Were and are … a Kieler costs about £22 and the Apidea is £36 2.

Since I started (which wasn’t that long ago) the choices have proliferated. There are now a plethora of plastic or polystyrene equivalents to Apidea’s or Kieler’s. Some may be better, some may be worse. Many are less expensive (at least than an Apidea).

I’m sure all can be made to work and the general principles I discuss below probably apply to the majority of these true mini-nucs (and any number of homemade equivalents). Note that both Kieler’s and Apidea’s can be extended by the addition of a second story which are really needed for overwintering queens in these small boxes. If you aspire to try that, make sure whatever make you choose is extendable.

Kieler with ‘upper storey’ added … not so mini now

In addition to these mini-nucs there are now hives that take frames about 15 cm square, or homemade versions using half-size super frames in a super divided four ways. None of these are really mini-nucs. I’ve no real experience of them and so can’t talk about their pros and cons. Friends who have them tend to rave about how good they are, but I’ve too much incompatible equipment already and can’t justify their additional cost (they can be three times the price of a Kieler).

A love-hate relationship

I have a love-hate relationship with my mini-nucs.

I love …

  • the limited resources needed to set them up. A cup full of bees, a lump of fondant and a mature queen cell gets you started.
  • their value for money. A Kieler costs less than a pretty cheap commercial queen and you can produce 2-3 mated queens in a single Kieler in one season. If you buy (or sell) queens they pay for themselves within a season.
  • the speed with which queens get mated and start laying. In my experience this is significantly less time than a 5 frame nuc, and less still than a full hive.

However, it’s not all good news. There’s a lot to dislike about mini-nucs as well, this includes …

  • the work involved in setting them up properly. I’ll discuss this further below.
  • their size and my fat fingers. The clue is in the name. Mini-nuc. Finding the queen is easy, but manipulating the frames can be a little awkward.
  • the maintenance they need. Mini-nucs are high maintenance. If you’re not careful, during a dearth of nectar they will starve, during a glut they will pack the box completely, during a cold spell they will freeze and during a heatwave they will abscond. And, if none of these things happen, they’ll get robbed out by wasps 3.

When I lecture or teach queen rearing for beginners I recommend using 5 frame nucs until you can produce good queen cells reproducibly and as needed. Then try some mini-nucs …

General principles

Whatever the make, all mini-nucs are used in broadly the same way.

The empty box contains 3-4 frames, often just consisting of a topbar and a starter strip, and a compartment for food. You can fill the latter with syrup or fondant (or damp granulated sugar). It’s worth noting that some manipulations of these little boxes may require them to be inverted at the start, so you either need to add syrup later or use fondant.

Kieler mini-nucs: four topbar frames and an integral feeder

A cup full (perhaps 250 ml to 300 ml) of bees is added to the mini-nuc and left for a few hours (at least) so that the bees realise they are terminally queenless. You then add a near-to-emergence queen cell, or run a virgin queen in through the entrance.

The mini-nuc needs to be placed in the mating apiary, not too close to queenright hives (or you can lose some of the bees added to the box). These hives are very poor at thermoregulating – there aren’t enough bees present – and they readily overheat. Therefore, place the mini-nuc in dappled shade or somewhere it doesn’t get the full strength of the sun.

Gimme shelter … an Apidea mini-nuc ‘catching a few rays’ … a recipe for absconding

The entrance is opened and 7-10 days after the queen emerges she should be mated and laying. You remove the mated queen and add another near-to-emergence queen cell … ad infinitum, or at least until the end of the season.

After removing the last mated queen of the year you shake the bees out and store the mini-nuc in the shed for the winter months.

What could be easier?

Of course, it’s not quite that straightforward …

Stocking mini-nucs

Ideally you stock a mini-nuc with young worker bees. Older workers are more likely to disappear back to the hive they came from (unless you move the mini-nuc a few miles away) and will be less good at drawing comb. Young bees are also likely to survive for long enough to rear the new brood once the queen is mated and laying.

Note that I also stated worker bees … you should avoid including drones, firstly because they contribute nothing to the functioning of the little colony, and secondly because you probably want the queen to mate with drones from outside the apiary 4.

There are lots of ways of achieving this, some more complicated than others. The best description I’ve read is by ModernBeekeeping in the instructions 5 they provided with Kieler hives.

In brief, this involves:

  • finding the queen in a strong hive and placing her somewhere safe (on a frame in a two-frame nuc, or in a cage in your pocket … she’ll be fine in either for a few hours).
  • moving the brood box to one side and placing an empty brood box on the hive floor.
  • shaking all the bees from the brood frames into the empty brood box. Work fast. The bees will try and clamber out. Give them a few sprays of water from a plant mister to help contain them 6.
  • placing a queen excluder over the bee-filled-but-otherwise-empty brood box, then putting the brood box and brood-filled frames on top of this.
  • retiring for a well-earned cup of tea.

About three hours later …

While you were drinking tea the young bees moved up through the queen excluder to tend the brood. The drones will remain below the queen excluder and a lot of the foragers should be out foraging. You’ve effectively isolated the young bees and so can now harvest them.

Each fully-covered frame has 2500-3000 bees on it … you’ll need about 1000 for each mini-nuc.

Getting them from the frames in the brood box to the mini-nuc involves the following:

  • shaking the bees off the frame into a deep, smooth sided container with curved internal corners/joints. A washing up bowl is suitable, a picnic cooler is better.
  • periodically misting the bees in the container with water. Don’t drown them. Just spray them enough to stop them crawling up the sides too much. It helps to give the container a sharp bash onto the ground every now and then to shake the bees down to the bottom again. But remember … you need live bees in your mini-nuc so treat them as gently as possible.
  • scooping up 300 ml of bees into a flexible, clear measuring container. I use a cut-down 2 litre drink bottle; prepare it in advance by adding 300 ml of water and marking where the meniscus is. That’s the volume of bees you need.

Mister and bee-measuring-scoop

  • quickly pouring the damp bees into the mini-nuc. If you’re using Kielers you do this by adding them through the removable floor with the hive inverted on the ground or table. It’s easier doing it like that than trying to add the roof – one handed, after adding the topbar frames, with bees clambering out everywhere (which can be carnage). Take my advice, fill the feeder with fondant and add the bees to an inverted Kieler.

Kieler’s ready for stocking with bees

Tidying up

The more bees you harvest from the donor hive, the less able it will be to look after the brood it contains 7. Therefore, if you’re filling several mini-nucs you will probably need to harvest the bees from multiple hives. All can be added to the same washing up bowl/picnic cooler before distributing them to the mini-nucs.

Once you have harvested sufficient young bees and populated the mini-nucs:

  • reassemble the donor hives and add back the queen. If you’ve harvested nurse bees from more than one donor, make sure you add the correct queen back to each hive! 8
  • place the mini-nucs somewhere cool and dark. I put them in the garage. Leave them closed up for 24-72 hours and mist them with water twice a day through the mesh floor panel.

Mini-nucs … populated, terminally queenless and panicking in Garrison Kieler (sorry)

Adding the queen cell and relocating to the apiary

  • add the queen cell 1-2 days before the queen is due to emerge. Apidea’s have a neat ‘port’ in the plastic crownboard through which the cell can be added. I do the same thing with a sheet of polythene on Kielers. If you’re doing this indoors (where escaping bees might be an issue for non-beekeeping members of the family) then do it at night with a red head torch. Bee can’t see red light and so won’t fly 9.
  • the following day, place the mini-nuc out in the apiary, open the entrance and let the bees fly. I tend to do this late in the afternoon.

Mini-nucs – note entrances facing in opposing directions

  • check the queen has emerged by recovering the opened queen cell a day or two later. There’s no need to look for the queen.
  • cross your fingers and wait 😉
And they're off

And they’re off …

It’s as easy as that?

Yes, in theory.

In reality though …

As with so many things to do with queen rearing, timing is very important. Typically you need to use the queen cells 10-11 days after grafting. Therefore the mini-nucs should be made up 2-3 days before that. When I lived in the Midlands, for the first round of queen rearing, this might have been in the third week of April.

Remember the proverb ‘March winds and April showers bring forth May flowers’?

In particular the ’April showers’ bit … 😉

In my experience, populating mini-nucs in the rain is probably the worst task in beekeeping.

All the bees are in the box.

They’re not happy being disturbed.

They are particularly unhappy about being unceremoniously shaken into a new box.

And, if it continues raining, they’ll be extremely resentful about being disturbed again when you return from drinking tea (and topping up your anti-histamines) to shake through the box again.

But, the queen cells will not wait.

Queen cells ready to ‘rock and roll’

If you’re going to do this for the first time, choose a really good flying day, ideally when there’s a nice flow on. The bees still won’t like being messed about with, but it will be a whole lot easier for you.

All sorts of other things can go wrong, and sometimes do. I’ve had misters block (having previously been used for syrup), I’ve tipped the picnic cooler over, I’ve put two queens back into one hive … I could go on.

It gets easier with experience and the effort is worthwhile. You’re setting up tiny little hives from which your precious queens will fly and get mated. And once established, they can be used several times without all the palaver involved in stocking them in the first place 🙂

Queen mating

It is my impression that queens tend to get mated faster from mini-nucs than they do from 5-framers, or full hives. Of course, I’ve never done a side-by-side comparison of the two 10, but I have talked to a number of experienced beekeepers who have expressed the same opinion.

Why should this be?

The consensus was that the small boxes give the queen fewer opportunities to hide, meaning that the workers can more easily chivvy her out on orientation and mating flights.

However, while re-reading Gilles Fert’s Raising Honeybee Queens (Fert, 2020) I found a comment that contradicts my experience:

American breeders have noted that queens in very small mini-nucs mate later than those from larger colonies, and with a success rate of just 60% to 70%. They found that tripling the volume of these mini-nucs boosted the success rate to 92%!

I’ll try and track the original source down … and determine whether the ’no space to hide’ and ’chivvied out by the workers’ have any basis in fact or are just the sort of daft ideas beekeepers share when stuck indoors on a wet day.

I’ve certainly not noticed a lower queen mating success using mini-nucs but, statistically, I’ve not used them enough to observe the difference between 70% and 92%.

A queen about to go on an orientation flight

Once you know the queen has emerged just leave the bees to get on with things, other than checking stores and space periodically. On good flying days, or potential queen mating days (which can be worse than you might imagine – it was 14.5°C when the photo above was taken), it’s important not to disturb the colony in case you interrupt an orientation or mating flight.

And, once you have your mated queen, you can use her for whatever you want … requeening production colonies, making up nucs for overwintering, selling or donating.

That’s all folks …

Of course, that’s nothing like all.

When I decided to write about mini-nucs I jotted down a list of interesting things to cover. Almost none of them are in the preceding 2,700 words 🙁

Typical.

That’s because I can’t cover some of the more interesting aspects of mini-nucs without covering the basics first. I’ll therefore return shortly – perhaps even next week – to this topic and waffle on about:

  • DIY modifications/improvements to Kieler’s
  • How to judge the quality of the queen
  • Repeat queen mating and ‘caretaker’ scrub queens
  • Overwintering mini-nucs
  • Emptying mini-nucs at the end of the season
  • And anything else I can think of in the intervening period.

Note

Mating in miniature is the title of a book by Bernard Möbus on queen mating in mini-nucs. It looks a little dated now (it was first published in 1983) but is an interesting read and, although the equipment has changed in the last 40 years, the principles remain much the same. I think it was published by BIBBA, but they no longer list it (and nor do Northern Bee Books). Try eBay?

References 11 

Fert, G. (2020) Raising Honeybee Queens: An illustrated guide. Deep Snow Press. ISBN 978-0-9842873-8-3

Eats, sleeps, bees

10 Replies

Synopsis : The beekeeping season is starting to get busy. Swarm control is not only essential to keep your hives productive, but also offers easy opportunities to improve the quality of your bees. Good records and a choice of bees is all you need. This week I discuss stock improvement together with a few semi-random thoughts on honey labelling, colony behaviour and wax foundation. Something for everyone. Perhaps.

Introduction

May is usually a lovely month in Scotland. It is often dry and sunny enough to spend much of the time outdoors, the days are long enough 1 to get a lot done and it’s early enough in the year to avoid the dreaded midges 2.

Usually and often.

Unfortunately, the weather so far this month has been unseasonably cool. It was probably better for much of March than it’s been for the first half of May.

But that good weather in March gave the bees a real boost – particularly in my apiaries on the east coast of Scotland.

Consequently, there’s still a lot of beekeeping to do now – swarm control, preparations for queen rearing, catching up with all the things I didn’t do in the winter ( 🙁 ) – often in between some rather iffy weather 3.

The next couple of months are usually pretty much full on … hence Eats, sleeps, bees 4.

Latitude …

The differences I discussed in Latitude and longitude a month ago are particularly marked now.

Beekeepers in Sussex or Kent have been complaining about running out of supers since mid-April. Other have been proudly displaying their first (or second) round of grafted queen cells.

In contrast, a few of my west coast colonies are still only on 6-7 frames of brood. It will be at least another fortnight until I even think about whether they’ll need swarm control.

Which might be a fortnight before they’ll actually need it.

These are perfectly healthy west coast native bees, adapted to the climate and forage available here.

The wonderful west coast of Scotland

They are classic late developers, evolution having timed colony expansion to fit with the local forage and the availability of weather good enough for queen mating.

There’s insufficient forage to produce oodles of brood in late April and many colonies have yet to produce any mature drones (though they all now have drone brood). Instead, they build up rather slowly, and are probably at the peak in July when the heather starts to yield.

This is all reasonably new to me and I feel I’m still learning how the season develops here on the west coast. I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it.

Eventually 😉

Going by the rate colonies are currently building up, and their performance last year, I expect to be rearing queens from these colonies in June and early July 5.

… and longitude

Meanwhile, in Fife things are progressing much faster.

My apiaries there are about 160 miles east and at a similar latitude, but most of the colonies are already overflowing their boxes. Swarm prevention is a distant memory and I’m now busy with swarm control.

The genetics are different. My east coast bees are all local mongrels, again adapted to local conditions.

However, I suspect an even greater difference is the early season forage and – although it’ll be finished in the next week or so – the oil seed rape (OSR).

Oil seed rape … and rain

The OSR gives colonies a massive boost. They gorge on it – both the nectar and pollen – quickly filling supers and a multitude of hungry larval mouths. Reasonably strong nucs made up for swarm control on the 1st of May are now in a full brood box and will be more than ready for the summer nectar flow when it starts.

Queen rearing would have started already if the two boxes I’d earmarked for cell raising hadn’t become a little overcooked and produced queen cells at the beginning of the month 🙁 .

The best laid plans etc. 6.

And, to add insult to injury, the (lovely quality) colony I’d intended to source larvae from produced queen cells the following week.

D’oh!

Quality control

One of the (nominal) cell raising colonies – we’ll call it colony #6 for convenience 7 was borderline in terms of temperament.

On a balmy afternoon, with a good nectar flow, the bees were calm, unflustered and a pleasure to handle.

However in cool, damp or blustery weather they weren’t so great.

This is one of the reasons that record keeping is so important. Although I’d not inspected them this season in very poor conditions 8, my records from last year also showed they were, shall we say, ’suboptimal’. Not psychotic or even hugely aggressive, but certainly hotter than I’d prefer and nothing like as stable on the comb as I like 9.

Of course, the simple answer is not to go burrowing through the box in ‘cool, damp or blustery weather’ 🙂

However, I don’t always have a choice as these bees are 160 miles away. Met Office forecasts are good for tomorrow, questionable for next week and essentially guesswork for next month (which is when I’m booking the hotels).

So, having realised that both swarm control and quality control were needed, how have I tried to improve the quality of this colony?

Controlling quality

I discovered open, charged queen cells in colony #6 on the 1st of May. Without intervention the colony would have swarmed before the end of the first week of the month 10. The queen was clipped but, as I hope I made clear last week, queen clipping does not stop swarming.

Swarm control

I used my preferred swarm control method by making up a nuc with the old queen and a couple of frames of emerging brood with the adhering bees. I put these, together with a frame of stores and a couple of new frames into a nuc box and moved them to an out apiary several miles away.

By moving the nuc away I don’t have to worry about losing bees back to the original hive. I can therefore make the nuc up a little weaker than I would otherwise need to. An out apiary (or two) isn’t essential, but it makes some tasks a lot easier.

I then went carefully through colony #6, shaking all the bees off each frame and destroying every queen cell. There were still eggs and young larvae present, so they would undoubtedly make more queen cells before my visit a week later. However, by shaking every frame and being rigorous about destroying every queen cell I ensured:

  • there would be a bit less work to do the following week
  • I’d not missed a more mature cell somewhere that could have left a virgin queen running about at my next visit. This was unlikely, based upon the timing of brood development, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Colony #6 is in a double brood box. While ransacking the brood nest for queen cells I also hoiked out a frame of drone brood and cut out yet more drone brood from a foundationless frame or two. Since the genetics of this colony was questionable it made sense to try and stop these undesirable genes being spread far and wide.

At the same time I rearranged the frames, moving all the unsealed brood into the top box.

One week later

Early on the morning of the 8th of May I checked the colony again. As expected there were more queen cells reared from eggs and larvae I’d left the week before.

The vast majority of these queen cells were in the top box, but – since I’m a belt and braces beekeeper – I checked the bottom box as well. Again, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

All of the queen cells were again destroyed.

Tough love … but if you want to improve the quality of your bees you have to exclude those with undesirable characteristics.

Importantly, by now the youngest larvae in the colony would be at least four days old. This is really too old – at least given the choice (and I was going to give them a choice) – to rear a new queen from.

Room for one more …

I rearranged the frames, leaving a gap in the middle of the top box, closed colony #6 up and completed my inspection of the other colonies in the apiary.

The last colony I checked was my chosen ‘donor’ colony with desirable genetics.

More swarm control 🙂 and a few days saved

The donor colony (#7) had started queen cells sometime during the first week of May and so also needed swarm control. However, very conveniently it had produced two nice looking cells on separate frames.

Both these queen cells were 3-4 days old and so would be capped in the next 24-48 hours.

A three and a bit day old queen cell

I could therefore use my standard nucleus swarm control (to ‘save’ the queen ‘just in case’), leaving one queen cell in colony #7 and donating the other queen cell to colony #6.

Which is exactly what I did.

Having gently brushed off the adhering bees from the frame (you should never vigorously shake a frame containing a queen cell you want 11 ) I gently slotted it into the gap I’d left in the upper brood box of colony #6. I also marked the frame to make my subsequent check (on the 15th) easier.

The frame marked QC is the only one that needs to be checked next week

By adding a well developed, but unsealed, queen cell to colony #6 I’ve saved the few days they would have taken to rear a queen from an egg or a day old larva.

Because the cell was open I was certain it was ‘charged’ i.e. it contained a fat larva sitting contentedly in a deep bed of Royal Jelly 12.

Better to be safe than sorry (again)

There were also eggs and a few larvae on the frame containing the queen cell (which was otherwise largely filled with sealed brood). It was likely that some of these would also be selected to rear new queens.

And they were when I checked on the 15th.

There was my chosen – and now nicely sculpted and sealed – cell and a few less well developed cells on the donated frame.

I know the cell I selected was charged and the larva well nourished.

In addition, I also had total confidence that the bees had selected a suitable larva to raise as a queen in the first place. After all, the survival of the resulting colony depends on it.

Therefore, I didn’t need any backups.

No ’just in case’ cells.

Rather than risking multiple queens emerging and fighting, or the strong colony throwing casts, I (again) destroyed all but the cell I had originally selected.

I’m writing this on the 17th and she should have emerged today … so my records carry a note to check for a laying queen during my first inspection in June.

This shows how simple and easy stock improvement can be.

No grafting, no Nicot cages, no mini-nucs and almost no colony manipulations etc. Instead, just an appreciation of the timings and the availability of a frame from a good colony (and this could be from a friend who has lovely bees … ).

And in between all that

That was about 1400 words on requeening one colony 🙁 . That was not quite what I intended when I sat down to write a post entitled Eats, sleeps, bees.

My east coast beekeeping – including 8-9 hours driving – takes a couple of days a week at this time of the season. On the west coast I have fewer colonies and – as outlined above – they are less well advanced, so there’s a bit less to do 13.

However, there are always additional bee-related activities that appear to fill in the gaps between active colony inspections.

I’ll end this post with a few random and half thought out comments or questions on stuff that’s been entertaining or infuriating me in the last week or so.

In between the writing, inspections, Teams meetings, editing, reviewing and writing … 😉

Honey labelling

I use a simple black and white thermal printer – a Dymo LabelWriter 450 – to produce labels that don’t detract from (or obscure) the jar contents.

Dymo thermal label (and a jar of honey)

I’ve used these for over 6 years and been very happy with the:

  • cost of the labels (a few pence per jar)
  • flexibility of the system. I can change the best before date, the batch number or other details for each print run; whether it’s 1 or 1000.
  • ability to include QR codes containing embedded information, like a website address or details of the particular batch of honey.

However Dymo, in their never ending quest for more profits a ‘better consumer experience’ have recently upgraded their printers and label printing software 14.

The newest incarnation of the printer I use – now the Dymo LabelWriter 550 – only works with authentic Dymo labels.

A more accurate spelling of authentic is  e x p e n s i v e , at least if you only buy labels in small quantities (100’s, not 1000’s).

If you fancied adding a little square label on the cap of 100 jars claiming ”Delicious RAW honey” you’d not only be falling foul of the Honey Labelling Regulation, you’d also have to cough up £18 for a roll of labels.

Dymo labels are great quality. Smudge proof, easy to remove and sharp black on white. In bulk they are reasonably priced (~3p – the same cost as an anti-tamper label – if you buy >3000 at a time).

However, you can get similar labels for a third of the price … but they won’t be usable in the new printer.

The Dymo LabelWriter 450 has no such restrictions and is still available if you look around.

I’m tempted to buy a spare.

Colony to colony variation

I started this post with a discussion of variation due to latitude and longitude. However, individual colonies in a single location can also show variation (in addition to temperament, running, following etc.) that I don’t really understand.

I have three colonies in a row behind the house here on the west coast. I can see whether they are busy or not when I’m making coffee, doing the washing up or pottering in the work room (two of these activities are more common than the other 😉 ).

All in a row (though not the colonies referred to in the text as they’re camera shy)

And they are consistently different, despite being pretty similar in terms of colony strength and development.

One colony typically starts foraging before the others and another, probably the weakest of the three, forages later and in worse weather.

Early in the season these differences were so marked I thought that one of the colonies had died.

I assume – because a) I’ve not got the imagination to think of other reasons, b) it’s the justification I use for anything I don’t properly comprehend, and c) I’ve not done any experiments to actually test what else it could be – that this is due to genetics.

It’s only because I’m fortunate enough to look out on these colonies dozens of times a day that I’ve noticed these consistent behavioural differences. I suspect my other colonies show it, but that I’ve never looked carefully or frequently enough.

Attractive foundation

I’m busy making up nucs for swarm control and sale. Although many of the frames I use are foundationless I also use a lot with standard foundation. The frames are built (or should be built!) in the winter, but I add the foundation once the weather improves and there’s less risk of cracking the brittle sheets due to low temperatures.

I buy foundation once every season or so and carefully store it somewhere cool and flat. Some of these sheets are quite old by the time I get round to using them and they often develop a white powdery ‘bloom’ on their surface.

Before (bottom) and after (top) 30 minutes in the honey warming cabinet

I used to run a hairdryer over the frames containing these bloomed sheets. The warm air brings out the oils in the wax and makes they much more attractive to the bees. They smell great!

Frames in the honey warming cabinet (W = worker foundation, to distinguish them from D = drone)

These days I just stick a ‘box full’ of frames at a time into my honey warming cabinet set at about 40°C for 30 minutes. Not necessarily quicker, but a whole lot easier … so freeing up time to do something else related to bees 🙂

Note

Today is World Bee Day. The 20th of May was Anton Janša’s (1734-1773) birthday. He was a beekeeper – teaching beekeeping in the Hapsburg court in Vienna –  and painter from Carniola (now Slovenia). He promoted migratory beekeeping, painted his hives and invented a stackable hive. 

Cut more losses

38 Replies

This is a follow-on to the post last week, this time focusing on feeding and a few ‘odds and sods’ that failed to make it into the first 3000 words on reducing overwintering colony losses.

Both posts should be read in conjunction with one (or more 1 ) of my earlier posts on disease management for winter. Primarily this involves hammering down the mite levels before the winter bees are produced, so ensuring their longevity.

But also don’t forget to treat your colonies during a broodless period in midwinter to mop up mites that survived the autumn treatment, or have reproduced since then.

Why feed colonies?

All colonies need sufficient stores to get the colony through the winter until suitable nectar sources and good enough weather make foraging profitable the following spring.

How much the colony needs depends upon the bees themselves – some strains are more frugal than others – and the duration of the winter. If there is no forage available, or the weather is too poor for the bees to fly, then they will be dependent upon stores in the hive.

A reasonable estimate would probably be somewhere around 20 kg of stores, but this isn’t a precise science.

It’s better for the colony to have too much than too little. 

If the colony has stores left over at winter’s end you can always remove them and use them when you make up nucs later in the season. Just pull out the frames and store them safely until needed.

Unused winter stores

In contrast, if the colony starts the winter with too few stores there are only two possible outcomes:

  • the colony will starve to death, usually in late winter/early spring (see below)
  • you will spend your winter having to regularly check the colony weight and opening the hive to add “emergency rations” to get them through the winter

Neither of these is desirable, though you should expect to have to check the colony periodically in winter anyway.

Feeding honey for the winter … and meaningless anecdotes

By the end of the summer the queen has reduced her laying rate and the bees should be backfilling brood comb with honey stores. If you assume there’s about 5 kg of stores 2 in the brood box then they’ll need about another 15 kg. 

15 kg is about the amount of honey you can extract from a well-filled super. 

Convenient 😉

Some beekeepers leave a full super of honey on the hive, claiming the “it’s better for the bees than syrup”. 

Of course, it’s a free world, but there are two things wrong with doing this:

  • where is the evidence that demonstrates that honey is better than sugar-based stores?
  • it’s an eye-wateringly expensive way to feed your colonies

By evidence, I mean statistically-valid studies that show improved overwintering on honey rather than sugar.

Not ‘my hive with a honey super was strong in spring but I heard that Fred lost his colony that was fed syrup’ 3.

That’s not evidence, that’s anecdote.

If you want to get this sort of evidence you’d need to start with a lot of hives, all headed by queens of a similar age and provenance, all with balanced numbers of brood frames/strength, all with similar mite levels and other pathogens.

For starters I’d suggest 200 hives; feed 50% with honey, 50% with sugar … and then repeat the study for the two following winters.

Then do the stats 4.

The economics of feeding honey

If I were a rich man …

The 300 supers of honey used for that experiment would contain honey valued at about £80,000.

That’s profit, not sale price (though it doesn’t include labour costs as I – and many amateur beekeepers – work for free).

The honey in a single full super has a value of £250-275 … that’s an expensive way to feed your bees 5.

Particularly when it’s not demonstrably better than a tenner or so of granulated sugar 🙁

But there are more costs to consider

The economic arguments made above are simplistic in the extreme. However, there are other costs to consider when feeding colonies.

  • time taken to prepare and store whatever you will be feeding them with 6
  • feeders needed to dispense the food (and storage of these when not in use)
  • energetic costs for the colony in converting the food to stores

Years ago I stopped worrying (or even thinking much) about any of this and settled on feeding colonies fondant in the autumn.

Fondant mountain ...

Fondant mountain …

Fondant is ~78% sugar, so a 12.5 kg block contains about 9.75 kg of sugar.

This year I’m paying £11.75 for fondant which equates to ~£1.20 / kg for the sugar it contains.

In contrast, granulated sugar is currently about £0.63 / kg at Tesco.

The benefits of fondant

Although my sugar costs are about double this is a relatively small price I’m (more than) prepared to accept when you take into account the additional benefits.

  • zero preparation time and no container costs. Fondant comes ready-wrapped and stores for years in the box it is purchased in
  • no need for jerry cans, plastic buckets or anything to prepare or store it in before use
  • no need for expensive Ashforth-type feeders that sit around for 95% of the year unused When I last checked an Ashforth feeder cost £66 😯 
  • it takes less than 2 minutes to add fondant to a colony
  • no risk of spillages – in the kitchen, the car or the apiary 7.
  • fondant is taken down more slowly than syrup, so providing more space for the queen to continue laying. In addition, in the event of an early cold snap, fondant remains accessible whereas bees often stop taking syrup down

Regarding the energetic costs for the colony in storing fondant rather than syrup … I assume this is the case based upon the similarity of the water content of fondant to capped stores (22% vs. 18%), whereas syrup contains much more water and so needs to be ripened before capping to avoid fermentation.

Fondant block under inverted perspex crownboard – insulation to be added on top.

Whether this is correct or not 8, the colony has no problem taking down the fondant over a 2-4 week period and storing it.

What are the disadvantages of using fondant? 

The only one I’m really aware of is that the colony will not draw fresh comb when feeding on fondant (or at least, not enthusiastically). In contrast, bees fed syrup in the autumn and provided with fresh foundation will draw lovely worker brood comb. 

Do not underestimate this benefit.

They fancied that fondant

Brood frames of drawn comb are a very valuable resource. Every time you make up a nuc, or shift a nuc to a full-sized box, providing drawn comb significantly speeds up the expansion of the resulting colony.

Nevertheless, for me, the advantages of fondant far outweigh the disadvantages …

Finally, in closing, I’ve not purchased or used invert syrup for feeding colonies. Other than no prep time this has the same drawbacks as syrup made from granulated sugar. Having learnt to use fondant a decade or so ago from Peter Edwards (Stratford BKA) I’ve never felt the need to look at other options.

Let’s move on …

Ventilation and insulation

Bees can withstand very cold temperatures if healthy and provided with sufficient stores. In northern Canada bees may experience only 120 frost-free days a year, and cope with 3-4 week periods in winter when the temperature is -25°C (and colder if you consider the wind chill).

That makes anywhere in the UK look positively balmy.

Margate vs. the Maldives … a similar temperature difference to Margate vs. Manitoba in the winter

I’ve overwintered colonies in cedar or poly boxes for a decade and not noticed a difference in survival rates. Like the honey vs. sugar argument above, if there is a difference it is probably minor. 

However, colony expansion in poly boxes in the spring is usually better in my experience, and they often fill the outer frames with brood well before cedar boxes in the same apiary get there.

Whether cedar or poly I take care with three aspects of their insulation/ventilation:

  • the colonies have open mesh floors and the Varroa tray is only in place when I’m actively monitoring mite drop
  • all have insulation above the crownboard in the form of a 50 mm thick block of Kingspan (or Recticel, or Celotex), either integrated into the crownboard itself, placed above it or built into the roof
  • I ensure there is no upper ventilation – no matchsticks under the crownboard, no holes etc.
  • excess empty space in the brood box is reduced to minimise the dead air space the bees might lose heat to

In my experience bees actively dislike ventilation in the crownboard. They fill mesh with propolis …

Exhibit A … are you getting the message?

… and block up the holes in those over-engineered Abelo crownboards …

Exhibit B … ventilated hole in an Abelo crownboard

Take notice of what the bees are telling you … 😉

Insulation over the colony

I’ve described my insulated perspex crownboards before. They work well and – when inverted – can just about accomodate a flattened 9, halved block of fondant.

Perspex crownboard with integrated insulation

Finally, if it’s a small colony in a brood box 10 then I reduce the dead space in the brood box using a fat dummy. 

Fat dummy with integral feeder

Fat dummy …

I build these filled with polystyrene chips.

You don’t need this sort of high-tech solution … some polystyrene wrapped tightly in a thick plastic bag and sealed up with gaffer tape works just as well.

Insulation ...

Insulation …

I’ve even used bubblewrap or that air-filled plastic packaging to fill the space around a top up block of fondant in a super ‘eke’ before now.

However, remember that a small weak colony in autumn is unlikely to overwinter as well as a strong colony. Why is it weak? Would you be better uniting it before winter starts?

Nucleus colonies

Everything written above applies equally well to nucleus colonies.

A strong, healthy nuc should overwinter well and be ready in the spring for sale or promoting to a full colony.

Here's one I prepared earlier

Here’s one I prepared earlier … an overcrowded overwintered nuc in April

Although I have overwintered nucs in cedar boxes I now almost exclusively use polystyrene. This is another economic decision … a well made cedar nuc costs about double the price of the best poly nucs. 

I feed my nucs fondant in preparation for the winter, typically by adding 1-2 kg blocks to the integral feeder.

Everynuc fondant topup

Everynuc fondant topup

Because of the absence of storage space in the nuc brood box it’s not unusual to have to supplement this several times during the autumn and winter.

You can even overwinter queens in mini-mating nucs like Apidea’s and Kieler’s.

Kieler mini-nuc with overwintering queen

This deserves a post of its own. Briefly, the mini-nuc needs to be very strong and usually double- or triple- height. I build fondant frame feeders for Kieler’s that can be quickly swapped in/out to compensate for the limited amounts of stores present in the brood box.

Kieler mini-nuc frame feeders

My greatest success in overwintering these was in winters when I provided additional shelter by placing the nucs in an unheated greenhouse. A tunnel provided access to the outside. However, I know several beekeepers who overwinter them without this sort of additional protection (and have done so myself).

Just because this can be done doesn’t mean it’s the best thing to do.

I’d always prefer to overwinter a colony as a 5 frame nuc. The survival rates are much better, their resilience to long periods of adverse weather is significantly greater, and they are generally much more useful in the spring.

Miscellaneous musings

Hive weight

A colony starting the winter with ample stores can still starve if the bees are particularly extravagant, or if they rear lots of brood but cannot forage.

The rate at which stores are used is slow late in the year and speeds up once brood rearing starts again in earnest early the following spring (though actually in late winter).

Colony weight in early spring

As should be obvious, this is a Craptastic™ sketch simply to illustrate a point 😉

The inflection point might be mid-December or even early February.

The important message is that, once brood rearing starts, consumption of stores increases. Keep checking the colony weight overwinter and supplement with fondant as needed.

I’m going to return to overwinter colony weights sometime this winter as I’m dabbling with a weather station and set of hive scales … watch this space.

An empty super cuts down draughts

Periodically it’s suggested that an empty super under the (open mesh) floor of the hive ‘cuts down draughts’, and is therefore beneficial for the colony.

It might be.

But like the ‘overwintering on honey’ (and being a pedant scientist) I’d always want to see the evidence.

There are two claims being made here:

  • a super under the floor cuts down draughts
  • fewer draughts benefits the colony which consequently overwinters better

Really?

There are ways to measure draughts but has anyone ever done so? Remember, the key point is that the airflow around the winter cluster would be reduced if there are fewer draughts. 

Does a super reduce this airflow significantly over and above that already caused by the sidewalls of the floor?

And, even if it does, perhaps the colony ‘reshapes’ itself to accommodate the draught from an open mesh floor.

What shape is the winter cluster?

For example, in an uninsulated hive (including no insulation over the cluster) with a solid floor the cluster is likely to be roughly spherical. They minimise the surface area.

With an open mesh floor are they more ellipsoid, so avoiding draughts from below? If so, is this improved much by an empty super below the open mesh floor? Does the cluster change shape or position? I don’t know as I’ve not compared cluster shapes in solid vs. open mesh floors plus/minus a super underneath.

And anyway, an open mesh floor looks very like a baffle to me … how much better can it get? How draughty is it in the first place?

Is this example 8,639 for my ‘Beekeeping Myths’ book?

I do know that top insulation tends to flatten the cluster against the warm underside of the crownboard.

Midwinter cluster

A strong colony in midwinter

Having worked out that draughts are (or are not) reduced … you still need another couple of hundred hives to test whether overwintering success rates are improved!

More winter bees

Finally, always remember that the survival of the colony is dependent upon the winter bees. All other things being equal (stores, disease etc.), a colony with lots of winter bees will overwinter better than one with fewer.

This is one of the reasons I stopped using Apiguard for mite control in autumn. Apiguard contains thymol and quite regularly (30-50% of the time in my experience) stopped the queen from laying, particularly in warmer weather. 

Apiguard works well for mite control, but I became wary that I was potentially stopping the queen at a time critical for late-season colony development. I worried that, once treatment was finished, a cold snap would shut down brood rearing leaving it with suboptimal numbers of winter bees.

I never checked to see whether the queen ‘made good’ any shortfall after removal of the treatment … instead I moved to Scotland where it’s too cold to use Apiguard effectively 🙁

 

Your first bees

11 Replies

June is a good time to start keeping bees.

The long, cold, dark winter is a distant memory. The uncertainties of spring – the unseasonably warm days in March, the April (snow) showers, the “will they, won’t they” doubts over spring build up (in a cold year) or early swarming (in a warm one) – are over. 

If you did a ‘start beekeeping’ course in the winter then waiting until June to get bees might feel like a lifetime, but it actually makes a lot of sense.

You miss the roller coaster ride that spring sometimes provides. In a bad year, starvation or swarming can leave you without bees by the end of May 🙁

Instead, you benefit from better (more settled) weather, stronger colonies and at least three months to get to confidently work with your bees as you – hopefully – get some summer honey and prepare them for the winter ahead.

Buy local bees

There are compelling reasons to buy local bees. By this I mean queens reared locally.

More locally reared queens …

Not Greece or Italy 1, imported in large batches and dropped into a box of ‘local’ workers, all of whom will be replaced within a month. These are effectively bees from southern Europe and are quite possibly not suited to Cumbria or Essex 2.

Several scientific studies have shown that locally reared bees do better than imports, particularly when overwintering. 

But the benefits don’t end there. If you buy bees locally you’ll probably buy them from a local beekeeper 3. I’ve proposed before that this could be your mentor … and that, ideally, you could have helped split the nuc from a strong colony, watched it develop and then purchased it.

But that’s not always possible. Mentoring is time consuming and dependent on the organisation of the local beekeeping association, to say nothing of simple geographic factors 4 or Covid and social distancing.

When you buy local bees you should expect to get some of the ‘back story’ on the colony. When was the queen grafted, when did she start to lay? 

If you do agree to buy bees from a local beekeeper, don’t then go and then buy them from someone else. Preparing nucs is time-consuming and involves committing resources from honey production or making increase. At the very least, a beekeeper reserving a nuc for you probably means s/he is turning other potential purchasers away. Have some courtesy.

A 5 frame nuc when sold should contain a frame of stores, a laying queen (!) – clipped or marked if requested  – and 3-4 frames of brood in all stages.

There should be sealed brood in the colony laid by the queen heading the colony.

OK, enough preamble … what about the practicalities of getting the bees home, installing them in a hive and doing your first inspection?

Transporting bees

If you are collecting your nuc from a local apiary it will probably already be sealed up for transport. The entrance should be sealed securely and the frames should be wedged in place so they won’t flap around during transit. I use closed cell foam blocks for this, but it may not be necessary in some smaller nuc boxes.

Preparing a nuc for transport. Note the foam block to secure the frames.

You might not be provided with a strap, so bring your own. Ratchet straps are probably overkill for a nuc, but they certainly do the job. Gaffer tape works well, as do these ‘no moving parts but can I remember how they work?’ hive straps.

Standard hive straps

If you collect them at the beginning or end of the day there will be more bees in the box and fewer foragers out, er, foraging.

It’s always good to actually get the bees you’re paying for 😉

More importantly, it’s also cooler at the start or end of the day, which is one less thing to be concerned about when transporting bees. Since you’re buying locally you won’t be transporting the bees far. That being the case, it’s usually sufficient to make sure there’s good airflow under the open mesh floor, without using a travel screen.

If you move bees in the heat of the day expect to have to use some sort of mesh screen over the top of the frames. The last thing you want is overheating and stressed bees. 

Mesh and staples

Actually, that’s the penultimate thing.

The last thing you want is the combs melting and collapsing … avoid this at all costs.

Escapees

Secure the nuc in the car 5 so that it can’t tip over. The frames should be in line with the direction of travel.

It’s not the end of the world if they’re perpendicular to travel, but it reduces the ‘frame flap’ when accelerating and decelerating. 

I often put the bees on the car seat, strapped in place with a seat belt, with a sheet or two of newspaper underneath the OMF to stop getting nectar or pollen on the nappa leather upholstery my filthy car from soiling the nuc box.

I’ve moved dozens of nucs like this and never had a problem.

Drive carefully.

You might find one or two bees “escaping”. In my experience these are more likely to be ‘hitchhikers’ who were underneath the open mesh floor, rather than Houdini-like bees that have circumvented the sealed entrance of the nuc 6.

Stop and let them out at the earliest opportunity … it’s safer and they’re more likely to get back to the home apiary.

If you’re 10 miles away from the apiary their fate is probably sealed 🙁

Opening the hive entrance

Bees can be a bit disoriented and distressed after a car journey.

Therefore, don’t be in a rush to open them up too soon.

I always place them in the location they are going to be permanently sited and leave them for at least half an hour.

Then, and only then, I gently open the hive entrance.

If you do it as soon as you arrive the bees may come flooding out … if you leave them to settle they will be much calmer.

Correx, the beekeepers friend ...

Correx, the beekeepers friend …

Don’t bump or rock the hive.

Don’t wrestle with the sealed entrance.

Hopefully the 30+ minutes recuperation time has allowed you to work out a strategy to open the hive entrance with the minimum disturbance possible.

Those rotating entrance disks have got a lot to commend them 🙂

Ideally you want the bees to be barely aware that the entrance is now open when it wasn’t a moment before … for example, there’s usually no need for smoke 7.

Remember, the bees know nothing about their new environment. You want them to explore it at their own pace, rather than releasing a few thousand agitated bees all at once.

Open the entrance so the bees can come and go, but don’t leave a cavernous maw gaping that they might struggle to defend,

Take a few steps back and enjoy watching the first orientation flights of your new bees.

And that’s it for the day … leave them in peace.

Transferring the nuc to a full hive

At this time of the season the bees will rapidly outgrow a 5 frame nucleus hive. If you leave them in there too long the queen will run out of space to lay and they’ll start to think about swarming.

Remember that overcrowding is one of the (many) triggers for swarming and, once they’ve decided to go, it can be very difficult to stop them.

Here's one I prepared earlier

Here’s one I prepared earlier … an overcrowded overwintered nuc in April

Therefore you need to transfer them to a full-sized hive within – at most – a few days of acquiring them 8.

You will need a full hive – floor, brood box, crownboard and roof – together with five or six (or 7 for the new Abelo boxes I see) frames with foundation fitted 9.

Frame orientation – frames from nuc in red, new foundation in grey

Since this is probably also the first time you are going to open the nuc (and, if it’s not, why did you look earlier? See the final section of this post.) you’ll also need a beesuit, hive tool and smoker.

  • Move the nuc gently to one side and place the new floor and brood box where the nuc was, with the entrance facing the same direction.
  • Gently smoke the nuc. Just a couple of puffs near the entrance should be more than sufficient. You don’t need to ‘kipper them’.
  • Transfer the 3-4 frames of brood one at a time, placing them next to each other in the new hive. By all means have a brief look at each side of the frames, but place them in the new hive in the same orientation with regard to their neighbours. The goal here is that the brood nest is not unduly disturbed.
  • Flank these with a frame or two of foundation and then add the frame of stores.
  • If I’m arranging the frames the ‘warm way’ i.e. parallel to the hive entrance, I’ll place the occupied brood frames closer to the entrance. This helps the colony defend the entrance. If the frames are perpendicular to the entrance (the cold way) I place them in the middle of the hive 10.

Add the crownboard and roof. 

All done.

Feeding the colony

Probably the first dilemma faced by a new beekeeper is whether to feed the recently re-hived nucleus colony. 

This is what beekeeping is all about … making judgement calls based upon the strength and state of the colony, in the context of the local environment and with an understanding of what the weather is going to be like over the next week or two.

Get used to it … you’ll be making a lot of decisions like this 😉

Here are a couple of scenarios …

  1. Unseasonably cold weather with lots of rain and an understrength nucleus colony.
  2. Warm, settled weather with a very strong nucleus colony in an environment with abundant forage.

The first must be fed for it to survive, let alone thrive.

The second may well not need feeding at all.

It’s best to err on the side of caution and feed nucs if there’s any doubt they will not have enough nectar to draw fresh comb and expand the brood nest. 

This spring – at least since late May – the nectar flow has been exceptional and I’ve not fed any nucs. All have drawn comb ‘for fun’, often drawing successive frames one after another that I’ve rotated into the box.

If the colony does need feeding I prefer to use a contact feeder (a plastic bucket with a fine mesh grille in the lid inverted over the brood nest) containing 1:1 (by weight) syrup made of granulated sugar and water.

Welcome to your new home … nuc ‘promoted’ to hive with contact feeder in place

The aim it to imitate a good nectar flow rather than allow the bees to store large amount of syrup stores. You want them to draw new comb and rear lots of new brood.

I place the contact feeder directly over the top bars, separated by a couple of wooden spacers. I do this because most of my crownboards lack central holes. Use a spare super to enclose the contact feeder.

I think my contact feeders are ‘half gallon’ ones … they are just big enough to take a mix of 2 litres of water and 2 kg of sugar 11. If the weather remains poor, or the nectar remains elusive (you could always ask the local beekeeper you bought the nuc from … another advantage of buying local bees 😉 ), then it will do no harm to give them a second ‘half gallon’ of syrup to help them build up.

Do not spill syrup in the apiary. It encourages robbing and your new colony may not be able to defend itself. If in doubt, again err on the side of caution … reduce the entrance size of the hive.

Inspections and enjoyment

On a warm, calm, settled day you should conduct your first colony inspection. Nucs, even recently promoted ones in a full hive, are usually a pleasure to inspect. There are sufficiently small numbers of bees that you should be able to see what’s going on relatively easily.

Don’t worry about finding the queen. If there are eggs present and no sealed queen cells then she will be in the hive.

Marked queen surrounded by a retinue of workers.

They’re not always this obvious …

It’s always a bit risky making assurances like that as I can think of several scenarios when I would be wrong.

If there are eggs present then there was a queen in the hive within the last 3 days 12.

If there are sealed queen cells present then it’s possible that the hive has swarmed.

But what about eggs being present together with unsealed queen cells?

That'll do nicely

That’ll do nicely …

There are two obvious explanations, one of which is much more likely for a new beekeeper with their first colony:

  • The colony was dead set on swarming and has swarmed without waiting for the queen cell to be sealed. This happens, but it’s unlikely to occur with a nucleus colony just moved to a new hive 13.
  • The queen has very recently died – or, more accurately, been killed – and the bees are rearing new queen cells under the emergency impulse,

New beekeepers are understandably enthusiastic … but they can be clumsy.

It’s not unusual for a queen to be damaged or killed during a colony inspection by an inexperienced beekeeper 14. It’s easy to squidge the queen between the sidebars of the frame and the brood box, perhaps because she’s rushing about after the colony was smoked too much, or between frames when returning them to the hive.

If you can’t find the queen you can’t be sure where she is.

Accidents happen.

This was almost certainly the fate of my first ever queen which disappeared a week or two after I bought my nuc … and I thought I was being so careful 🙁

Which brings me to my last couple of points. 

Do not inspect the colony more than necessary.

Once every seven days is sufficient. Don’t meddle. Let them get on with things. When they get to 7-8 frames of brood add a queen excluder and a super. 

Observe and enjoy them … from a distance. 

Congratulations … you’re now a beekeeper 🙂