Starting a nuc over a double screen?

[WI-beek]

Im going to be making some nucs in a day or two. Do you need to increase the queenless time before introducing a queen when you make bees queenless over a double screen. The obvious answer to me seems that it should make no difference but I just want to double check because they will still be sharing the hive scent. I typically wait 4-6 hours to introduce the queen, sometimes over night. My plan is to take brood over a queen excluder for a couple hours, then replace it with a double screen board and introduce the queens a few hours later. I have never made nucs over a screen board so this is new to me. Out weather has been very cold so I want to let them share the heat from parent colony till the weather finally warms up in a week or two.

Thanks

[Kendal]

Oh! You plan to raise nucs over your parent hive. I thought you were planning to do a 2-queen management system. The process is very similar. I had great success with it in Ohio, just raised up to a whole box (minus the queen, very important) and put a caged queen in, all over the division screen. I let the bees free her from the cage in their own time, but I wanted to make sure they knew they had a queen for themselves. The division screen prevents direct passing of the pheromone from the lower bees to the upper bees, just allows the heat to rise. So I didn't take chances with extended timing.

It appears your plan is sound insofar as to getting adequate nurse bee coverage up into your nuc area, but once you replace the excluder with the division board, I think you should go ahead and put a caged queen in there with them. She can pass her pheromone through her single layer of screen wire much more effectively than the lower bees can pass it through two screen wired separated by a good space. That's why they make it that way, so queens don't kill each other through a single layer.