After Installing a Nuc – Building Up the Colony

One of the biggest mistakes new beekeepers make is thinking that their nuc will become a strong honey bee colony in a couple weeks. In some cases, this may be true, I will explain later. In our apiary we do not find this to be true, and we have spoken to many people who struggle to raise their nucs or build nucs up to be very strong before winter.

When John and I started beekeeping, we lost a lot of bees. There never seemed to be a viable reason why we lost them. The hives always had resources left. But they just dwindled and died. We tried different breeds of bees. We bought bees off different people. It was about 5 years before this trend slowed down.

At the time we were frustrated. What we didn’t realize is that we were learning. As we changed how we raised our nucs through the summer, our overwintering success rate increased. We didn’t know why until last year, when I listened to a lecture at the Ontario Beekeepers Association conference given by Eugene Roman.

I was reminded of what I learned while listening to him talk about nucs at this springs OBA meeting. Mr. Roman talked about nucs not having the same behavior as hives. I thought about this and realized that we had come to the same conclusion, but had not articulated the concept.

First, let me state that our bees are in a high agricultural area. While we look for river valleys, meadows, clover fields, and woodlands to put our bees, we cannot escape the endless miles of corn and soya beans.

If we were able to put nucs in areas where the clover came right up to the hive, with a water source near by, then they may build up faster, and stronger. But, our bees need to fly a long distance to find food. This changes the way the hive grows.

We have friends that experience a very difference first year of beekeeping. Their nucs grow out fast. I included this information for those of you who have lost bees for a couple years, and didn’t know why.

Maybe this will be your secret to success.

Bees Building Out a Strong Honey Bee Colony

You have your nuc. It is installed in the hive. If you waited until the end of May, then it will probably start to build out fast. If you bought your nuc at the beginning of May, then there will not be enough bees to warm the new brood, so there will be less brood.

I remember the years we were taught that if a queen isn’t laying then we need to pinch her and get a new queen. Then we learned that the nurse bees will follow a queen, eating the eggs, if they cannot look after them.

Nurse bees need three things to raise an egg into a bee. They need pollen, nectar, water, and most importantly – heat.

Your nuc came with 2 frames of brood. That brood can take up to 10 days to hatch. When the new bees are born their job is to clean out the cells. It can take 2-3 days before these new bees start to look after the new brood.

In this first two week period, the foragers will revert to being nurse bees to try and help the colony survive. They cannot do the job as good as new born bees, but they will try. This means that there are no bees bringing resources into the hive.

Your nuc came with a frame of honey, and maybe a bit of bee bread, but this is not enough to feed the frame of eggs the queen just laid, so the bees will cannibalize most of the eggs.

This sets your hive back.

To mitigate this damage, we make sure there is a water source very close to the nucs. We are going to start putting a water source on each pallet of nucs this year. We will add a pollen substitute patty with pre biotics and pro biotics. We will also add 1:1.25 sugar:water mix. This will stimulate wax creation and brood rearing.

If you add 1:1 sugar:water mix then you will stimulate storing honey, which you do not want in the spring.

Can your nucs survive if you do not feed?

Yes.

But, maybe not.

They may look like they are doing well. You will watch the bees coming and going from your hive, and like we did, think that everything is awesome.

A hive builds up to about 40000 bees by the end of June.

Let’s do some math

A package of bees is about 10 000. A nuc can have 10 000 to 15000 bees.

The worker bees that came in the nuc will die in by mid June.

There are 3500 cells on each side of a deep frame, about 7000 cells per frame. If a queen lays 2/3, that is 4600 new bees. Your queen needs to raise 10 frames of new bees to become strong, not the 2 – 3 at a time that we thought when we first started beekeeping.

A frame takes 21 days from egg to hatch. So in May/June, your new hive needs to have 2 -3 frames of capped brood, 2-3 frames of larva, and 1-2 frames of eggs to reach it’s goal of 40 000 bees.

If there is a shortage of pollen, or nectar, due to a very wet or dry season, if a cold spell sets the hive back, if the bees cannibalize the eggs and larva, then you will not reach these numbers.

What Can Prevent a Honey Bee Hive from Building Out?

The biggest mistake we see is that people are in a rush to put that second box on the hive. This means there are too many undrawn frames in the hive, and it is very hard for the bees to keep the brood warm.

The second thing we see is that most new beekeepers never give the bees water. All our bees have a water source within sight of the hives. If not, then we put a water source with a solar fountain in it.

Another problem, we do not typically wrap nucs or new hives in Ontario. It is not a common practice, and it should be. We do not unwrap our hives until the third week of May. We never remove the 1” Styrofoam and silver wrap insulation from inside the cover.

When we install a nuc, we will leave it wrapped, with R24+ on the lid, until the nights do not drop below 10C, or the first week of June. If we help the bees stay warm, then they can raise more brood. If they can raise more brood, in 10-14 days there will be more foragers. In 21 days we will start having about 4000 – 4500 nurse bees. In about 30 days we will have 4000 – 4500 nurse bees, and 4000 – 10 000 foragers.

This means that if we installed the nuc on May 3, and kept it wrapped, feed, and with water, we should see the hive build up by the first week of June.

But, if we did not wrap, or feed, and those bees cannibalized even ½ of the eggs/larva in the first 2 weeks, this is what happens by the first week of June.

The original bees are ready to die.

They are replaced by only 2000 +/- nurse bees, which means many of the foragers may not be foragers but still trying to be nurse bees. Which means there may still be a lack of pollen in the hive. Which means the bees may still be cannibalizing the next generation of bees.

Your nuc is only ½ as strong. You will not see as many frames of capped brood. The bees will not be at full strength by the end of June. They will not be building as many stores.

But one thing that we have seen is that the whole ‘behavior pattern’ of these hives are ‘off.’ It isn’t something that you can see at a glance, but when you start making records of hives on a regular basis, every week or two. You will notice a difference. (I do not suggest new beekeepers go into their hives this often.)

What I look for in a growing hive

Drone. This means the queen is happy, well fed, and the hive is growing. The nurse bees feel ‘rich’ and ‘fat and happy’. A struggling hive will make very little, if any, drone brood.

Bee Bread. By mid June you want to start seeing a pattern of brood in the center, lower part of the frame, bee bred around it, and honey to the top.

Nurse bees will not travel more than 2 – 3” to find food. They will not travel to the outermost frames. They prefer to have everything near the brood. If I do not see this, then I realize that new hive’s behavior is stunted. In this case I will often add more capped brood.

Food is the next concern. It still gets cold in the nights in May. It may also rain for a few days, which means the bees cannot forage. One frame of resources is not going to last long in a colony. A typical estimate is that 2 frames of food will last 1 month in the winter. I estimate that one frame of resources will last about 1 month, but not the pollen. The pollen will be the first resource to exhaust itself.

No pollen = no royal jelly = no brood.

A strong hive coming out of winter may have thousands of foragers.

Your nuc comes with a mix of bees. But even at that, in a group of 10 000 bees in a nuc, the most you can hope for is about 2-4000 foragers. Mathematically, the more foragers a new hive has, the fewer nurse bees it has, and vice verse.

A nuc cannot raise brood and collect resources at the same time. It will either struggle with both, or focus on brood, or foraging. A nuc cannot do both jobs well. If you feed, then your are telling the hive that there are enough foragers, and to put as many bees into raising bees. I have found that it is very easy to trick bees into behaving the way you want.

This is the entire premise of the Demaree Split!

When was the Nuc treated for Varroa Mites?

There are a couple ways of splitting a hive and building a nuc.

Split the hive, allow a brood break, and treat in the brood break.
Shake bees into a nuc box, add brood and resources. Treat the hive. Add a queen. Wait till she starts to lay and then sell the nuc.
Combine 2 frames of capped brood, 1 of larva, and about 2-3lb of bees. Add a queen, and sell in the morning.

You need to know how the nucs were made to know if there is a varroa mite problem.

#1 gives you time to treat in the brood break and have 90% effectiveness. In this method, the hive with the larva will have some larva killed by the pesticide.

#2 includes treating the hive before you put a queen in. You can do this with an oxy vape 1 or 2 times before adding a queen, and a frame with larva on it.

#3 is a very common, and accepted way of building a nuc. But, there is not chance of treating the nuc. The hive might have been treated, but you do not know how effective the treatment was. This can be a problem if the beekeeper is not ‘on top’ of hives.

Do not treat your nuc for 10 days. This will take you into June, so it will probably be too late to use Formic Pro if you are in Southwestern Ontario. This leaves you with an Oxalic acid dribble. I suggest doing a dribble every 4 days, for 4 – 5 treatments, to ensure effectiveness. The only problem is that the oxalic acid may cause some larva mortality.

The Beekeeper’s 7/10 rule and Brood Temperature

The 7/10 rule means that when 7 of 10 frames are drawn out then it is time to add another box. Sometimes beekeepers are in too much of a rush, or they are too worried about opening the hive too often, so they will put a new box on before there are enough frames drawn out.

The problem is, the bees cannot keep the brood warm. The brood must be kept at 93 to 97F, or 32 to 35C. Even on the warmest night in June, Ontario drops below this temperature.

When tracking historical temperatures for our area, June has not gone above 24C in the first three weeks of June, over the last five years. That is 10 degrees lower than the brood needs to be. In the nights, the temperature hovers around 8 – 12C, except for 3 – 5 nights.

A nuc only has 10 – 15000 bees. There is no thermal value in an empty frame, or drawn out comb. This means the bees need to work harder, require more resources, and keep the brood area smaller so the hive can keep the temperature constant.

Adding that second box on the top of the hive also wicks the heat upwards, away from the brood box. To the bees, there is a vast empty chasm above the brood box, making it difficult to heat the hive to 90F/35C.

Being impatient can slow down your bee colony build up.

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