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My beekeeping adventures continue, as I’m determined to help the bee population, and by default our garden and orchard. And…….eventually our bellies, being filled with all of the wonderful garden goodies!! I swear our strawberries were larger last year. I give the credit to the bees. 🙂 I had decided to purchase 2 nucleus hives, or ‘nucs’, from a local beekeeper to replace my 2 dead hives. There were a couple of reasons for this:
- The bees were local and the queen would have survived a Nebraska winter. This would hopefully produce bees with a better ability to survive this coming winter.
- I had read that nucleus hives get a head start on building up the workforce. And bees can use all of the help they can get!
A nucleus hive is a mini hive, with a laying queen, worker bees, and brood in multiple stages of development. This gives them a head start because the bees do not need to build comb before the queen can begin laying eggs and at least one batch of brood is getting ready to emerge. With the package bees, the bees need to build the comb before the queen can begin to lay eggs. Worker bees take 21 days in order to be fully developed. So, the package bee hive will not begin growing for at least 21 days after some comb has been built up, which can take a few days to a week depending on a number of factors. With the nuc already containing brood, the bees are able to build up their force much quicker than package bees. The worker bees clean out the cells after new bees emerge and the queen re-uses these cells.
Some of the drawbacks to starting with nucleus hives are cost and possibly bringing diseased brood or bees to your apiary. Because the nuc requires more labor and time for the beekeeper, they are understandably more expensive. Making sure to purchase a healthy nuc is extremely important. You want to make sure that you purchasing from an experienced and reputable beekeeper. You may also want to inspect the nuc before bringing it to your apiary. I had purchased mine from a fellow Omaha Bee Club member, and I felt very confident in the quality of bees I would be receiving.
With the unseasonable weather we experienced this spring, the nucleus hives weren’t ready when expected. They were a little late, but I was able to pick them up on June 7th. The nucs typically have 5 frames. The ones that I picked up were in small plastic hive bodies with vents and openings for the bees to come and go. The openings had small sliding gates in order to keep the bees in during transport.
I brought them home in the back of the Highlander again. And again, there were a couple loose, but they didn’t bother me at all. When I arrived home, I placed the nucs in the apiary and opened their gates. I left them here for a day to give them a chance to orient themselves.
The following day, I set up the new hives, opened the nucs, inspected for any signs of disease or distress and transferred the frames from the nuc to the new hive body. It is important to keep the frames in the same order as they were in the nuc. This keeps the brood cluster together so that the worker bees can care for the brood efficiently. See all of that orange color in the pictures below? That’s all capped brood ready to emerge in a few days! I located the frames in the center and added 5 more frames to the outside; 3 on one side and 2 on the other. That was it! Pretty simple.
The bees seem to be settling in well. I inspected them on June 14th. Each queen was found and there was still plenty of brood in multiple stages. The following weekend I gave each of them a second deep box to make sure they have plenty of room for honey storage. We don’t want them to begin storing honey in the brood box. This prevents the queen from laying eggs because all of the cells are full.
So far, I think I’m leaning toward the nucleus hives. They were only $25 per hive extra if you exclude the $15 deposit on the nuc box. The bees seem to be just as far along as the package I received in March, yet they were installed almost 3 months later. I think eventually, as long as all of the stars are in alignment, the three hives will look the same. Either way to begin is perfectly acceptable, the important this is to begin!
When cleaning up the old dead hives from last year, we decided to harvest the honey from frames that had non-uniform comb. It is much easier to inspect a hive with uniform comb instead of comb that sticks beyond the edges of the frame. We scraped out the comb and the honey into a couple of cleaned ice cream buckets. The frames were put back into the hives for the bees to finish cleaning. Once inside, we strained the honey through cheesecloth to separate it from the wax and any debris. We were shocked to fill six and a half pint jars with the good stuff!! And we still have a few frames of honey to feed to the bees if they are struggling. I suppose last year wasn’t a complete waste! 🙂
