BBKA Forum

Good afternoon,

My dad is all set up and ready to start keeping bees.
To save him some money I am going to give him some of mine.

What should the nuc consist of?
I know it should have newly laid eggs as well as larvae, capped brood etc etc and of course some stores.

My main query is should I provide the existing queen or allow the bees to rear their own?

Thanks in advance

Frame of Bias,an empty comb,full frame of stores ,two or three good shakes of bees ,and make up the capacity with new foundation.
If you have done swarm management by nucleus then the nuc should have your old queen and the donor hive is now rearing their own.
If this is not a split and you don't have one available then freshly laid eggs will be fine,but allow 3 weeks min after she's hatched before disturbing too much to allow her to mate and get going.
Make sure it's queenright before handing it over.

You don't say where you are located. Here in the north east its a bit early in my neck of the woods to be raising queens from eggs. Only a couple of my colonies have drones active so although possible its not ideal for mating yet. I would give it 2 more weeks here.
Good luck though

Thank you for the replies.

I'm based in berkshire. OK I may leave it a couple of weeks then rather than risk a new queen not mating.

Let your drones tell you.....
Most of my hives have drones and have had them since start of April. Now I'm seeing swarm preps in a few hives. That tell me the bees are happy enough to get on with their procreation. And I live in North Yorkshire, where we are usually a week or three behind everywhere else.

Mick advises caution as he is subject to bad weather but as Nigel says the drones will tell and you should be crawling with them in Berkshire by now.

To make the best queens you really need lots of nurse bees.
Some suggest that you simply split the colony into two without worrying where the queen is however this can lead to problems in the same apiary as the queenless bees sometimes fly back to the queenright hive if it's on the old location, leaving the brood to chill and die. If you are taking the bees elsewhere, then that problem goes away.

I would be inclined to give the queen and some brood and some bees to your dad and get him to take them home and allow your colony with plenty of brood and flyers to make their own queen - removing all but one good queencell a couple of days before the queencell is due to open.

At this time of year, a colony with a queen and two or three frames of brood should make up well.