Backyard beekeeping on the Isle of Newfoundland since 2010. 47°42'27.6"N 52°42'30.0"W
Category Archives: Nucs
“Nuc” is short for nucleus hive, a starter hive with at least frame of brood, pollen and honey — and a queen. For our purposes, a nuc will also refer to any colony contained in a single brood box.
It’s November 2018 as I look back and slightly revise this post. There’s a lot I would change, but I’ll leave most of it alone. Instead I’ll jump in here and there with some comments about what I would or wouldn’t do today.
I added a second deep (or hive body) to Hive #1 yesterday. As far as I can tell, it went well. The bees were calm after being misted with sugar water, way less agitated than when I used the smoker on them. All the frames had drawn out comb except one. I put about half the drawn frames in the new box on top with empty foundation frames between them. I installed four foundationless frames in the original box, placing them between drawn out frames. The honey and the brood seemed mixed together on the frames, so there were no all-brood frames or all-honey frames. There was brood in just about every frame I inspected. I saw some comb hanging off the bottom of one frame, but no swarm cells. Hive #1 appears to be doing great. I’ll see how the colony adjusts to the new box and having all their drawn out frames spaced out. The big experiment is the foundationless frames in the bottom box.
Here’s a shot of the bees after I removed a few frames from the hive:
I’ll upload some video of the procedure soon. (UPDATE: The video is posted.) Until then, allow me to present a big load of photos and descriptions of what I did. Continue reading →
Here’s the video of the non-intrusive hive inspection I did earlier today, recorded on my new fancy pants high definition camera.
Postscript (February 2020): I mention that there could be swarm cells in one of the hives. The chances of swarms this early in a colony’s life is just about zero.
I did a non-intrusive hive inspection this afternoon. I’ve been on a tiring film shoot for the past four days and I missed hanging out in the backyard watching the bees, surrounded by all my veggies and things. I’m glad I had the day off. Here’s a shot of some bees in Hive #2.
By non-intrusive, all I mean is I didn’t pull out the frames. I just removed the roof and the inner cover and looked down at the frames. The bees in Hive #1 have built more comb than those in Hive #2, probably because they went at least one extra week with a feeder. (No doubt about it, feeding the bees at this early stage accelerates comb building — more places for the queen to lay her eggs.) I scraped more comb from the inner cover of that hive. I plan to use the wax (I already ate the honey) to build some starter strips. From what I could see today, the bees in Hive #1 have drawn out comb on at least 7 of the 10 frames, maybe more. I was impressed with what I saw. I’m not sure when I should add another brood box to the hive, but I’m thinking as early as next weekend, the weekend after that at the latest. Continue reading →
It’s November 2018 as I take a second look at this post from 2010 so I can tweak away any bits that could be misleading to new beekeepers. I’ll jump in with comments as we go. So… let’s go.
I decided to do a thorough inspection of my honey bee hives today. It was supposed to rain all day, but the sun came out in full force in the early afternoon, so I took advantage of the sunshine and put on my bee suit.
I rarely wear a full bee suit anymore, only when I’m digging into a massive hive full of bees that aren’t in a good mood. Today, to inspect a single-deep colony, I use a veil or maybe a bee jacket. Gloves would be optional. I play that by ear. Mist. No smoke.
I need to find an experienced beekeeper to help me identify exactly what I’m looking at. I know I saw plenty of honey and plenty of uncapped brood. At one point I could see the little white larva at the bottom of the cells filling one full side of a frame. It was impressive. I couldn’t find the queen in either hive, but both seem to be laying plenty of eggs.
I’ll fess up. I don’t think I was able to spot the queen in any of my hives for the first year. My bees weren’t marked with paint to make them easier to see, so that didn’t help. I don’t believe I spotted the queen until my second summer when Aubrey Goulding dropped by to help me requeen one of my colonies that had a nasty queen. He found the old queen in no time and after that I didn’t have much difficulty spotting queens. Once you see how big the queen really is and notice how she moves, how the other bees move around her, how her abdomen (most of the time) is so elongated that her wings only reach halfway down her body — she’s unique and stands out among the thousands of bees in the hive. But it helps to get the ball rolling on this by having someone point her out to you like I did in 2015.
I’ve decided that I don’t like smoking the bees. The Seldom Fools beekeepers in Ontario spray their bees, and now so do I. Whenever the bees were agitated (I could hear the difference in their buzzing immediately), I just misted them with a little sugar water and five seconds later they were back to normal. I probably could have used plain water mist, but a little sugar never hurt no one. The last time I used the smoker on the bees, they were buzzing like mad and flying around the hives in large numbers for at least an hour afterwards. It took them a while to recover. Today, using the water mist on them, they were totally cool. You’d never know I’d completely dismantled their houses and put it back together again. I can see maybe using the smoker next year when we harvest some of the honey and have to brush the bees off the frames, but I’m convinced for now that misting the bees with a little water is the way to go.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using a smoker on the bees if it’s done right. I use a sugary mist on my bees 95% of the the time. I don’t do it because it’s more natural. I do it because most of the time I get the same effect (easier to control bees) using mist instead smoke. In general, though, I don’t break out the smoker until the bees are well into filling a second deep. Then I keep it on standby just in case I need the little extra umph that smoke provides. Continue reading →
It’s November 2018 as I take a second look at this post I wrote in 2010. It doesn’t make me cringe, but almost. I’m impressed by my enthusiasm and fascination for beekeeping, my attention to every little detail that I don’t understand. These days when I meet new beekeepers or people who want to get into beekeeping, I can usually tell what kind of beekeepers they’re going to grow up to be. Bad beekeepers don’t notice too much. Good beekeepers notice everything. You don’t have to tell them what to look out for because they’re already looking out for everything.
I got my first taste of honey from one of our hives this morning (5 minutes ago), and there is no doubt about it: It’s the best honey I’ve tasted in my life. This is what it looks like at the bottom of a Mason jar, a mouthful chunk of comb with honey in it.
I decided to inspect the hives this morning because it’s going to rain for the next few days and I knew I’d be too busy with my silly job next week to poke around with the bees. I wanted to look down at the frames to see how much comb has been drawn out, but I didn’t want to pull out the frames and disturb the bees too much.
Inner cover upside-down with broken comb attached in the middle. (July 30, 2010.)
I didn’t use a smoker on either of the hives because I don’t like the way smoke agitates the bees, even though it’s supposed to make the bees easier to handle. This is what I saw when I pulled off the inner cover from Hive #1. That’s broken attached to the middle. I didn’t plan on sampling any honey, but I knew I could scrape some off the top without bothering the bees too much.
Here you can see how thick the comb is on top of the frames — and it’s full of honey. I’m not sure if I should be concerned about this, if I should clean it up before it gets out of control — I don’t know. The last time I used the smoker on the bees, the whole hive lit up with a rumbling buzzing sound. Not using the smoker this time, they acted like I wasn’t even there.
Here’s a close-up of the broken comb. The bees were virtually silent during all this. Maybe they were wondering what happened to the roof and why there’s honey all over the place now. Most that were on the honey stayed on the honey, eating it up, I assume.
Bridge comb. (July 30, 2010.)
Many of the frames were connected together with comb. It’s going to be messy when I have to pull out the frames for a thorough inspection, which I have to do soon. I wonder, should I break up these connections now before it gets worse? It seems like it might be trouble.
And this is what I saw under the roof of Hive #2, a well-behaved and tidy little hive — and no honeycomb on top to sample. These bees haven’t drawn out as much comb as those in Hive #1, probably because I didn’t feed them anything for the first week. There are more bees in the hive now than there were two weeks ago, and more of the frames have been drawn out — in both hives. So the hives seem to be doing alright. I will have to give them a thorough inspection soon just so I can see exactly what’s going on — how much brood is being reared, if there are any swarm cells and so on. I’d like to find an experienced beekeeper to help me out with that, but if I have to I’ll keep doing what I’m doing: taking my best guess.
Anyway, the honey is delicious.
November 2018 postscript: That’s burr comb I had to scrape off because the inner cover was upside-down. The flat side of the inner cover is usually face down in the summer. It’s unlikely the honey I tasted from the burr comb was pure honey. It was most likely fake honey created from sugar syrup. Today I would not place empty frames between frames of brood so early in the life of a nuc colony. I would put the 4-5 frames of the nuc in the middle of the deep and probably let them build out to 7-8 frames before I’d start inserting empty frames.
It’s November 2018 as I review this old post from 2010. It’s an excellent example of what not to do and how easily new beekeepers are misled. By this time I had watched many video of beekeepers putting blank frames between brood frames, which is a thing I still do under specific circumstances. But it’s not something I’d even consider doing with the tiny brood nest of a nuc. Luckily my bees survived my bad beekeeping thanks to some unusually warm weather we had at the time.
I installed my honey bees four days ago on July 18th, 2010. I picked up our nuc boxes from the a Newfoundland Bee Company on the west coast of Newfoundland the day before at $200 a pop (and a 1300km, 16-hour road trip).
This is the first hive after I installed the bees. The emptied nuc box on the ground still had a few bees in it that eventually flew back into the hive. The upside-down Mason jar is full of a honey-sugar mixture that I made from safe local honey. (Grocery store honey often contains spores for various diseases that can do serious damage to a honey bee colony.) The bees will feed on a sugar syrup mixture until the fall. Continue reading →
I picked up three nuc boxes of honey bees last night. Two for me, one for someone who should be picking up her bees today. Here’s a shot of the boxes and the bees close-up.
I’ll install the bees into my hives later today.
I’ll document it all eventually. In the meantime, this is what the bees sound like in their boxes.
It’s November 2018 as I rewrite this post from 2010. Again, I’m struck by how I talked like I knew what I was talking about even though I had no experience as a beekeeper. Luckily installing a nuc is pretty straightforward and doesn’t require a great deal of experience to grasp. Most of what I wrote, even with no experience, seems accurate.
Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster the wait is over. I just got a call confirming that I can pick up my honey bees in 2 weeks. It will cost $400 for two nuc packages and I’ll have to drive eight hours to get them, but at least I know I’m going to have honey bees for two hives this year. Nuff said.
Okay, so what’s a nuc package and how does it work?
This is a nuc package. To reduce confusion, let’s call it a nuc box, because that’s what it is: a small box that contains the nucleus of a honey bee colony. A nuc box typically holds 4 deep frames, several thousands bees and a mated queen. Three frames will contain a combination of honey, pollen and eggs, everything a colony needs to stay alive. One frame is usually left empty so the worker bees have something to work on while they’re stuck in the box during shipment to their new hive. Continue reading →
