What is a Nucleus Colony
A nucleus colony or nuc, is a small hive. This hive has all it needs to quickly become a full size, productive beehive. This includes frames with drawn comb, a reserve of food, worker bees of all ages, brood of all ages and a young laying queen. The nuc should be packed with worker bees. Nucleus colonies should grow rapidly into full size equipment. Nuclues colonies have huge advantages over packages. First, the bees in a package have no brood and no drawn comb. Drawing comb and starting brood takes a suprising amount of resources and time. It takes a package 4 to 6 weeks to catch up to a nuclues colony. Second, the bees in a package are shook from multiple hives, these bees are not related and have never met before being shook. Finally, the queen, the queen is a newly mated queen that has never met these bees. Packages are known for high queen failure rates in the first year because of the conditions these queens are mated in.
What makes a good nuc?
The most important thing is a young, well mated queen. The queen shoud be marked and the color should be appropriate for the year. Sometimes, you purchase an over wintered queen, which is a late season queen from the previous year or a new queen from the current year. The nuc should be 2/3’s full of mixed brood, mostly capped with some open brood. The frames should be in good shape without any cracks or damage. You may have some drone brood but it should be minimal. There should be enough worker bees to easily cover the frames of brood. The brood has to be covered by bees to be kept warm. All if this is important when buying a nuc. A nuc meeting these criteria, will be able to be installed immediately in regular equipment and grow rapidly. A nuc with less than the above, will not build up as quickly and may struggle the first year. Insist on being able to inspect the nuc during pickup. You will lose some foragers, but this insures you are getting what you are paying for.
5 frame or 8 frame?
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