making up nucs tomorrow - help me get over my nerves

[deejaycee]

Hi folks!

Haven't been around for a while as I'm flat out studying for my Cert in Beekeeping, which finishes in a month and a half, but meantime it's spring here in New Zealand and the girls have also been demanding a good bit of attention.

Sunday a bit over a week ago I grafted 15 queen cells, at least 10 of which have been accepted. Tomorrow (Wednesday) I'll be making up nucs out of our two home hives for these cells to go into.

Some questions please to ease my nerves and help me get through this as smoothly as possible:

1 - Have I got my day right - If the grafts were done Sunday, is Wednesday the right day to nuc em? I guess the question is if I'm counting ten days from grafting, is the grafting day 0 or day 1?

2 - Should I make up the nucs in advance of putting the cells in at all? If needs be, I could make up nucs this afternoon, which would give them 24 hours queenless before the cells go in? Or am I best to just bung em all in at once?

3 - should I close up the nuc and block the girls in for a while after making them up? If so, for how long? Theyre going into 3/4 depth four frame nucs, pine construction with the typical nuc round entry hole. Temperatures here are expected to hit 22C tomorrow - about 72F, and I'll be making up the nucs around 3-4 in the afternoon.

4 - positioning of hives/nucs. I can't move the nucs off site until the weekend. They have to stay in the yard for four days after they are made up. I'm worried about all the girls abandoning the nuc to go back to their original hive. I'm thinking perhaps I should move the main hive (it will be reduced from five high down to one or two boxes high once I'm done) about ten feet away and sort of stack the nucs where the hive was originally to encourage foragers to settle in the nucs. I think the 'glue' of having the queen with some brood in the original hive should see that hive alright, or should I worry about that depopulating as well?

5 - The nucs will be made up with one frame of honey, one of capped brood, one open brood and one of honey. If I'm short of brood, which do I sacrifice including for right now - the capped or the open? I can supplement with a frame of brood from the new site on the weekend, but it might be tight tomorrow.

NB - the hive I'm primarily making the nucs up out of is not the hive that has bred the queen cells - I have two in the backyard, so the nuc-making hive is bursting strong and hasn't been weakened by the effort of queen production so far.

Anyways, really appreciate any suggestions you might have. Very excited for this to go as well as possible.

[BEES4U]

I grafted on 9/15 at 10:00 a.m. and here is my count:
(You can not count the day you grafted! :scratch:Think about how a time sheet is filled out.)
9/16 @ 10:00 a.m. = 1st day
9/24 is when I cell my nucs as day 10 with warm weather speads up their development and cold weather slows them down.
9/23 we are cageing out mated queens and 9/24 we are putting in cells.
This method prevents the occational older virgin queen from killing her sisters!
If I wanted to gamble I could put queen cells in at 5:00 a.m on 9/25.
I have graded cells by looking for cells that are a little fuzzy on their tip and put them in earlier. It also depends on the age of the larvae that you grafted.
I hope that you have a lot of drones that are sexually mature for the VQ's and calm warm weather.
:)Good Luck!
Ernie Lucas Apiaries

[Joseph Clemens]

Since you include a frame/frames of honey/nectar, or feed, then you can confine them in the nucs with screen (mine have screen bottoms) for the couple of days they need to stay in the near vicinity. Shade or inside a cool building can help.

Making that many nucs out of one hive is pushing it, but it should be possible, just difficult. I look forward to hearing of your progress.

[deejaycee]

Thanks very much for your responses. :)

Bees4U = ok, so grafting day is day 0 - makes sense. I'm a bit confused though that you say if you graft on 15/9 and cells are going out on 24/9 - that is only nine days isn't it? but that's because of the warm weather?

I grafted on 14/9 and they'll be going out on 24/9. Will just have to cross my fingers for no early emergences then. Think I'll be ok though = the weather here at the moment, while good, is not unusually warm. Definitely very young larvae that were grafted.

Yep, plenty of drones about in the yard they'll be going to.


Thanks Joseph :) Overheating if confined is my main concern I guess - especially given that my nucs are solid bottomed. I think if I can figure a screen for the tops I'll try and screen them in for at least a while after to settle down a bit.

Yeah, I know it's a push, and if it's too tight I'll just have to crush a couple of cells I guess.

Unfortunately my schedule went a bit pear shaped when I grafted on a Wednesday (which would have meant going into nucs on a weekend when I'm not working), but none of those cells took. I ended up regrafting on the Sunday four days later, hence the annoying mid-week nuc making. (I work full time, but finish at 3 on Tuesdays and WEdnesdays, so I have to schedule everything for then or weekends).

Thanks for the input guys.

[Joseph Clemens]

I wouldn't waste the cells, just double them up if necessary, seems to work out better that way, the virgins and the bees decide which one gets to be queen.

[deejaycee]

That's a good point. I guess it hedges my bets on any cell that might not emerge too.

[BEES4U]

I sleep better when I use the 9th day after grafting. It onley takes once for an emerged VQ to mess up your plans.
I recently checked your weather. 20/8 degrees C could cause some chilled brood. I would be cautious about making the nucs with the open brood as the bes will cluster for warmth and neglect the brood.
When you said that you might crush some cells I thought that you should put them into your nucs.
:no:The bees are going to drift to the hive/nuc that the old queen is in so you should not put her near the nucs.
Have fun!
Ernie

[Velbert]

MAKE YOUR DIVIDES TODAY IN THE PM
THEY MIGHT GO BACK TO THEIR OLD LOCATION KEEP LOCKED UP AND KEEP IN SHADE ALSO PUT YOU SOME FEED IN THE NUC TO KEEP THEM BUSY MAKE SURE THEY CANT GET OUT.


ONLY DRAW BACK YOU WILL NEED TO PLACE QUEEN CELLS IN AFTER DARK BECAUSE IF OPENED IN THE DAYLIGHT MANY WILL RUSH OUT AND GO DACK TO OLD LOCATION WHEN PLACING IN QUEEN CELL

JUST GET SUITED UP GOOD DONE THIS MANY TIMES BEFORE DAYLIGHT IN EARLY MORNING WHEN i NEEDED TO GET THEM IN BEFORE BEING AT WORK.

[deejaycee]

Thank you so much for all your input, and Velbert for your pm too - very helpful.

Unfortunately I missed the opportunity to make the nucs yesterday afternoon (it's now near 9 am Thursday here).

You do all have me nervous about an early emerging queen now though *lol* Ah well, fingers crossed and we'll do it different next time.

Weather is looking even better than expected - 25C and no wind, and overnights warmer too.

DH has taken a couple of hours off this afternoon to help me out, which will be great having another set of hands.

Thanks again - I'll report back down the track with success rate :)

[Troy]

And so, how did it go?

[deejaycee]

It went great :)

To recap, I had two hives I was prepared to pull apart to make the nucs:

Hive 1: Original queen in top box of three with a split board between her and the other two boxes. Bottom two boxes contained bulk of the colony and my queen bar, which as it turns out had 12 queen cells completed.

Hive 2: Five boxes high - strong brood through four of them. Very strong colony. About three days before splitting I put queen excluders between all boxes so I could find her and separate - eggs were present this day. Three days later the queen couldn't be found and there were no eggs - oops - must have smooshed her in separating the boxes.

So on nuc day it went like this:

Hive 1 original queen and her single box separated off onto her own base board.

Hive 1 bottom two boxes with queen bar were left with one cell.

Both of these were shifted about six feet to the left.

Hive 2 was split up into 9 x 4 frame nucs - 1 pollen, 1 honey, 1 capped brood, 1 open brood. Ran a bit short on open brood, so two had capped brood only.

So Hive 2 started out with 50 frames in five boxes - 36 of these were used for the 4-frame nucs, leaving 14 frames - These were boosted with a couple of stronger brood frames from Hive 1's original queen, made up to 20 frames with empty comb from storage, and split into two 10-frame nucs in single boxes.

The two single box nucs and nine 4-frame nucs were stacked up where the original two hives had stood.

The following night (Thursday), the nucs were shuffled to even up the drift, and at 7 am Saturday morning the nucs were shifted out to the farm for mating (where we have 20 adult hives).

We deliberately shifted the nucs a bit after dawn so a few of the foragers would already be out and about and could return to Hive 1 with her original queen and the Hive 1 two-box split, which were placed back in their original positions.

So three weeks later, Hive 1 and her split are doing well - the split queen has mated and is laying.

Of the 11 nucs at the farm, nine are confirmed mated and laying. Two didn't have a laying queen a week ago on inspection - queens had emerged, but weren't evident. This weekend I'll be going out to move the nucs into single boxes, and any nucs that aren't queenright will be newspaper combined onto a queenright one.

All in all, pretty darn good. :D