BBKA Forum

British Beekeepers Association Official Forum 

  • Feeding a newly made up nuc

  • Beginners forum, ask beekeeping related questions and get help from other experienced beekeepers. Please use the Search Feature please to avoid duplicated threads
Beginners forum, ask beekeeping related questions and get help from other experienced beekeepers. Please use the Search Feature please to avoid duplicated threads
 #3085  by Brigsy
 14 May 2019, 16:11
Hello,

Good to see this forum is back. I have made a couple of nucs for various reasons and have frames of capped invert left over and removed from my hives at the start of spring. I have given one each to the new nucs. Do you think this would suffice for feeding rather than syrup? Not in quantity terms, but the form of feed.

Many thanks,

Brigsy.
 #3086  by AdamD
 14 May 2019, 16:30
An interesting question.
We can use syrup as a 'stimulative feed' to encourage the brood nest to grow as some queens will shut down when there is no flow. So as bees would need to uncap the invert to use it compared to a syrup feed, my assumption is that the colony might grow quicker if fed syrup. However the capped invert is a great insurance policy against a lack of nectar and an impending holiday, for example, as you should not need to worry about starvation if you are away.
 #3088  by Brigsy
 14 May 2019, 16:36
Thank you. I'm not that worried about encouraging growth as these are 'insurance' nucs. Just preventing starvation is my concern. Sounds like they should be ok. Logically, they should.
 #3089  by Chrisbarlow
 14 May 2019, 16:49
I sometimes use frames of stores in nucs instead if syrup but I uncap the whole frame before adding it into a nuc as this encourages them to use it more