One story with two questions:
1. When is a nuc not a nuc? I drove 2 hours to pick one up yesterday after being in continual contact with the beek for a month. When I got there, he looked suprised that I had medium frame equipment (even tho we'd discussed it previously)--apparently 2 of his 3 medium nucs had absconded and he thought the third was queenless. We went to take a look at it anyways--there was about 1/3 of the bees covering the frames compared to what I'm used to seeing on my frames at home, and no more than about 30 capped brood on the best frames. Most of the comb was honeybound. The beek said something about going to grab a cage--I didn't like where this was going, and asked him why--he wanted to sell me that nuc with a new queen put in right then and there! Is this standard practice???
I told him I'd rather just take a nuc of deep frames with an established queen and brood, and I'd transfer them to my medium equipment later. He gave me this odd look for a few seconds, and then said okay. I got my deep frame nuc and was even able to come back in the evening to keep my field workers. (Coming back hours later, I saw that he'd left the cover off the queenless hive--not sure if he'd forgotten to put it on, or if the nuc was so useless he just wanted it to disperse/die.)
2. This brings my second question: when we were opening the deep nuc, I noticed several SHB running around--the beek crushed about 5 while I watched. My original hive dosn't have this problem so I put the new one about 75 yards away and hope its far enough. But obviously the nuc isn't strong enough to control the SHB right now anyways. I have the deep frames in 2 stacked med nuc boxes, so there's even more extra room for the beetles to run around. My question is this: Should I give my bees another nuc box full of medium frames to start working toward transfering to mediums, or give them more time on the deeps to build up their numbers to deal with the SHB? I know I'm gonna have a forest of wild comb under those deeps in double med boxes, but I just don't have any deep equipment to keep them in. Also, as part of the transfer process, should I cut the best parts of the deep combs and rubber band them into mediums?? I don't intend to ever use deeps.
Thanks for any advice!
~Tara
1. When is a nuc not a nuc? I drove 2 hours to pick one up yesterday after being in continual contact with the beek for a month. When I got there, he looked suprised that I had medium frame equipment (even tho we'd discussed it previously)--apparently 2 of his 3 medium nucs had absconded and he thought the third was queenless. We went to take a look at it anyways--there was about 1/3 of the bees covering the frames compared to what I'm used to seeing on my frames at home, and no more than about 30 capped brood on the best frames. Most of the comb was honeybound. The beek said something about going to grab a cage--I didn't like where this was going, and asked him why--he wanted to sell me that nuc with a new queen put in right then and there! Is this standard practice???
I told him I'd rather just take a nuc of deep frames with an established queen and brood, and I'd transfer them to my medium equipment later. He gave me this odd look for a few seconds, and then said okay. I got my deep frame nuc and was even able to come back in the evening to keep my field workers. (Coming back hours later, I saw that he'd left the cover off the queenless hive--not sure if he'd forgotten to put it on, or if the nuc was so useless he just wanted it to disperse/die.)
2. This brings my second question: when we were opening the deep nuc, I noticed several SHB running around--the beek crushed about 5 while I watched. My original hive dosn't have this problem so I put the new one about 75 yards away and hope its far enough. But obviously the nuc isn't strong enough to control the SHB right now anyways. I have the deep frames in 2 stacked med nuc boxes, so there's even more extra room for the beetles to run around. My question is this: Should I give my bees another nuc box full of medium frames to start working toward transfering to mediums, or give them more time on the deeps to build up their numbers to deal with the SHB? I know I'm gonna have a forest of wild comb under those deeps in double med boxes, but I just don't have any deep equipment to keep them in. Also, as part of the transfer process, should I cut the best parts of the deep combs and rubber band them into mediums?? I don't intend to ever use deeps.
Thanks for any advice!
~Tara