The Honeybee Wranglers » nucs

The Nuc – A Summary to Date

Liz Thompson — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 23:33:57 +0000

On August 11, I was expecting to house a queen from the Q7 round of queen rearing. I made up a 4 frame medium nuc from my orange colony (the primary swarm from the observation hive). When I went to pick up the queen, she was dead. Darn. The nuc was pretty strong with 2 frames of young brood, a frame of capped brood and a frame of stores so I decided to let them have a go a queening themselves.

On August 23, I fed and inspected the nuc. There were lots of bees and capped brood. There were also 5 queen cells that the bees were in the process of tearing down. I did not see a queen.

On September 6, I inspected the nuc and found all 4 frames full of either young uncapped larvae or eggs. I didn’t see the queen but left with confidence that she was there and doing well. I made a plan to move the bees to a double deep 5 frame medium nuc set up to attempt to overwinter them in that configuration.

Today, September 8, I put my plan in action. I preloaded the new set up with 3 frames of stores and 3 frames of open brood comb and headed down to the nuc. Imagine my surprise when I found the queen walking anxiously back and forth across the screened inner cover with her retinue below, following her every move and feeding her! I quickly captured and marked her. She’s a beautiful striped queen. I moved the bees to their new quarters and watched the queen run between the frames. Within 10 minutes everything seemed settled for the evening. What a close call!

3 new royalty from Q3 marked in Libertytown

Kristien Z — Sun, 27 Jul 2014 13:50:28 +0000

This friday (7.25.2014), I located the 3 queens that I have from Q3 and marked them with an orange dot. There was brood in every nuc, but clearly, the one with the most bees (from the most brood given when the nuc was set up), had the largest amount of brood from the new queen. It could well be that a new queen judges how many workers are available to care for brood and adjusts her egg laying accordingly. One of the nucs was short on food; no honey or nectar in the frame. These bees had a empty frames, just foundation, and they were not working on that. I exchanged that with a frame of honey/nectar that I still had. Everyone happy again. Still not been able to take pictures.

Q3 status in Libertytown

Kristien Z — Sun, 20 Jul 2014 19:29:44 +0000

I started with 4 real nuc boxes for Q3 and one improvised queen castle (two compartment). All hives had a queen emerge, but today I checked for queens/bees/brood. This is my tally (July 20th, 2014):

Nuc with white dots: nice queen, one of the ones that Andrew grafted from George. Plenty of brood. I gave that hive a spare comb of honey from one of the deserted boxes.

Nuc with white square: nice orange queen, a Lisa. Lots of brood and bees. Some nectar.

Nuc with yellow triangle: big dark queen, George decendent. Lots of brood, bees, and nectar/pollen.

Amazingly, the nuc that started as the nurse hive and had most bees and brood when it received a queen, is now not the strongest hive. The most activity is at the Lisa hive.

About two days ago I started observing the hives more closely to see who was bringing in pollen. And that was these three. The nuc with the blue triangle was deserted long ago. The left compartment of the queen castle was also deserted early on. The other compartment still had a 100 bees, lots of honey but no brood or queen. And no pollen coming in. Quite telling thus.

I need some help catching and marking these queens if anyone has time. I am also in need of some deep boxes. Anyone has some that I can borrow?