As I mentioned in post one of this series, the queens have arrived and I’m ready to set up nucs. Usually, I establish nucs with purchased queens or, occasionally, from an extra queen I have found in an existing hive. (Yes, we sometimes find more than one queen in a hive.) I have also been known to use swarm or supersedure cells found in existing hives to provide queens in my nucs. I do not advocate setting up queenless nucs and allowing the bees to produce queens from eggs or young larvae. One reason is that this method sometimes produces poor quality queens, and sometimes none at all. Another is that the time required for the nuc to produce a laying queen from eggs or young larvae is over three weeks, compared to a few days with a purchased queen, and about a week and a half with capped queen cells. I want to see the population of the nuc grow quickly, not to wait weeks for the numbers to increase. If you add the three weeks it takes to rear a new queen from an egg and to get her laying, to three weeks for the new eggs to mature into young bees, you are waiting six weeks.
To set up nucs we need a nuc box or a hive. A nuc box is just a small hive used for the convenience of the beekeeper; the bees do not care about the size of the box. Five frame boxes are most common, Continue reading
