Andy wrote this for Prairie State Beekeeepers – our home club.
Packages
– are made with bees shaken from brood frames of colonies into a cage for transport.
Are they nurse bees? 2lbs vs 3lbs – basically you ensure you have more nurse bees… or do you? It all depends on who does the shaking’. Each package comes with a mated queen. The more nurse bees in the package, the better/sooner the artificial swarm will establish itself. These queens are freshly mated aka as soon as they start to lay, they are put into these transport boxes via a queen cage.
At most these queens are 2-3 weeks old from hatching. The bee package is immediately sent via mail. There is the stress of transport therefore DO NOT blow off picking up a package. Immediately place it in your hive body and watch the colony grow.
***PLEASE note, I have talked to several bee package makers… they DO NOT treat their packages, however the bees shaken into the package come from treated hives***
What about the freshly mated queen?
It requires approx. 45-55 days to properly evaluate a mated queen from hatching. So yeah, kind of rolling’ the dice with regards to the queens they send with the packages; good news is we are going to address this by supplying queens whose mothers overwintered with no or little chemical treatment for the club. We encourage our members to take advantage of this by buying nuc woodenware from Bill Budd & company from the workshop and the various projects to keep costs down and enjoy the hobby.
Nucleus Colonies/Nucs(5Frs)
– Nucs are a wonderful way to start a beehive. There are many types of nucs however.
Overwintered nucs
…are nucs with queens made the previous spring/summer whose queens made their own bees to overwinter. These queens are proven and in their prime for 1st honey crop producing season. Overwintered nucs can be offered at any time. I normally sell mine in February/March. This confirms that they are indeed overwintered. People come to my apiary and see for themselves. Apiary Inspector Bernie Andrews was out here one year in February 2018!
Overwintered nucs are the gold standard of nucs (packages) bought in spring. I charged $175 that year. This year it is $225 for an overwintered colony, 2023.
Olderwintered nucs
…can also be overwintered production hives that are split into two colonies (queenright nuc, and/or queen less 10Fr/any combo) in the spring.
The queen from the production hive is normally in her 2nd season for honey crop and thus not considered to be a prime queen. You want a vigorous healthy queen. She may fit the bill, I don’t know. She is proven and produced a crop with her own bees. Still many advocate for her removal in lieu of a prime queen.
Spring splits and spring nucs
…are made with frames of capped/open brood supplied with a queen or left to make their own queen (NOT IDEAL). After approx. 30 days or far longer, the queen should have laid all the brood in the box.
Sometimes it is supplied with a freshly mated queen from a reputable supplier (again, refer to the above warning about evaluating queens). This queen should be readily accepted by the hatching nurse bees and start laying immediately.
Sometimes a virgin queen is introduced, accepted, she mates and begins to lay.
Sometimes a queen cell is introduced, the cell is accepted, she mates, and begins to lay.
Sometimes, a queen cell or virgin queen is rejected, and the colony makes its own queen. She will be 2+weeks behind.
If the producer creates a spring split/nuc with a mated queen that he/she did not create… you can’t know what you are getting unless the nuc producer is extremely familiar with the queens history. One can deliberately put in all stages of brood, put in the queen and as soon as he/she sees eggs, call it a spring nuc! The queen is untested (not wintered), unevaluated and the bees could supersede her after they do their own evaluation 30 days after introduction.
If the producer creates a spring split/nuc with a mated queen from the previous year from a different hive from his/her apiary, you still have the same problem, but at least you know he/she made the queen(albeit 2nd year plus) and the acceptance will probably be 100% as he moved the laying queen onto laying capped brood frames. This is more palatable than the above situation.
If the producer created an early split or nuc and allowed it to create its own queen, this is a terrible scenario as the queen is a huge unknown. Was the queen well fed? Were there enough nurse bees? Too many unknowns.
Ideally, an early split or spring nuc is created with a queen made by the local producer with his/her own bees and queen. The local queen will be freshly mated through cell introduction (and mating) or transplant from mating colony and vigorously laying for at least 30 days IN THE NUC to show all stages of brood (egg to hatching) and patterns, hopefully the bees have undergone their own evaluation of the queen and fully accepted her without supersedure (45-55 evaluation rule).
I believe I explained the possible scenarios, can’t really think of different ones.
One last word.
Under ideal conditions
(I MEAN EVERYTHING GOING RIGHT) IF I grafted queens APRIL 1st. They would emerge 13 days on 14th of April. 10 days from then they would be mated and laying. 21 days from then the colony should have brood at every age produced by the vigorous young queen and bees to show with no supersedure cells. This nuc colony would be available for sale and worth buying as a spring nuc.
That day would be May 10th.
Nucs sold before that date can only occur with above shortcuts.
I cannot make queens till I start seeing drones. And then I normally give it a week before I start hatching queens to coincide with the maturity of the drones. Folks, it is going to be a bit, winter was long, spring is late. I am thinking the earliest we will have spring nucs “worthy” for sale is the final week of May. The further north you go the later this date is. The further south you go the earlier this date is. Protect yourself by informing yourself. Ask the seller reasonable questions should you have them.