Nuc Hives and Packages

How can you get a colony of bees for your new bee hive? You may purchase a complete hive from a beekeeper along with its colony of bees, or you may purchase a nucleus hive, or nuc, which is a small colony taken from a full-size hive. A nuc is a bee colony in equilibrium; it contains an egg-laying queen, brood of all stages, and workers of all ages. A nuc may be a split, or colony division. A split is made by dividing a hive, moving frames of bees to a new hive and introducing a new queen. Alternately, you may purchase a package of bees: bees in a box and not on frames. A package of bees typically contains three pounds of bees, about 12,000 bees, and a mated queen held in a protective cage. The bees in a package are workers gathered from numerous hives, and the queen is reared separately. A package of bees only becomes a colony after a few days when the bees detect and then organize their behavior around the queen’s pheromones.

 

You can gather bees when colonies swarm. Swarming is a natural occurrence; it is reproduction of bees on a colony-wide basis. European honey bee colonies, like those we have in the U.S., typically swarm once a year. If you are able to capture a swarm, it can be moved into a hive. You can put swarm catcher hives, or bait hives, in trees to attract swarming bees. There are two methods of moving bee colonies that are already established in structures like hollow trees or walls of buildings. You can attempt a trap-out, where you build a funnel to allow bees to exit the structure and not reenter. A cut-out involves physically opening the structure and cutting out the combs containing the bees and brood. I’ve bought or sold bees using each of these methods. Today’s photo: nucleus hives awaiting beekeeper pick-up at Bemis Honey Bee Farm in Little Rock.

--Richard

Independence Day

Independence Day, the Fourth of July, is a day of celebration in the United States. It’s the day that the Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776, marking the beginning of a new country. The Fourth of July has always been a significant day for Peace Bee Farm. Colonies started in the spring, from nucleus colonies, like the ones in today’s photo, packages, swarms, or colony divisions should now be well established. The memorable date is a good time to make some important bee hive record-keeping checks. We always counted the number of full-sized hives in place on the Fourth of July. When we harvested honey at the end of the summer, we divided the total weight of honey harvested by the number of hives in on the Fourth of July, giving a measure of the honey yield per hive. By keeping records of honey yield in each bee yard, the beekeeper can compare bee yards. While the yield of any bee yard may vary from year to year depending upon surrounding agricultural plantings, a measure of the honey yield over time can help the beekeeper determine which bee yards are low producers. These yards may need to be abandoned in favor of more productive yards. The Fourth of July is a day in which the bees are busy filling honey supers in the Arkansas Delta’s agricultural areas with soybean and cotton honey. In central Arkansas’ river valleys and Ozark Mountain foothills, early July marks the end of the spring honey nectar flow.

The Fourth of July is also a landmark in the beekeeping year. Swarms captured and hived before this date stand a good chance of building a large population of bees and accumulating enough honey to survive the following winter. Swarms captured after this date will likely starve over winter. These swarms need to be combined with existing colonies. After a quick count of your hives, enjoy the day devoted to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

--Richard

Small Hives are Vulnerable

Beekeepers can establish or expand their bee yards by purchasing hives from other beekeepers, purchasing nucleus hives, dividing existing colonies, catching swarms, or raising bees in queen mating nucleus hives. Beekeepers trying to expand their bee yards start with small populations of bees. Often nucleus hives smaller than full-size hives are used for expansion. These hives are especially vulnerable to a number of pests. As each of these new hives builds in population it is subjected to attack from numerous pests. Weak hives are regularly approached by wasps, yellow jackets, hornets, wax moths, small hive beetles, and mammals. However, the most persistent attackers of bee hives are often worker honey bees from other colonies in the area that attempt to rob honey stores. The best defense against bee hive pests is a strong population of honey bees. Bees can drive away intruding wasps, yellow jackets, wax moths, dogs, and other mammals. They remove the larvae of wax moths, and drive adult small hive beetles to the corners of the hive. Guard bees trap small hive beetles in propolis “traps” that the workers build. Small hive beetle traps often line the ends of bee hive frame top bars. Here, many beetles die of starvation. The bee populations of expanding colonies often fare better in small-sized hives because there is less open space for small hive beetles to move freely and lay eggs.

Our experience in rearing queens and expanding colonies at Peace Bee Farm is consistent: We have considerably greater success in rearing bees in nucleus hives than in full-size hives. Today’s photo shows worker bees returning to their small, expanding colony in a queen mating nucleus hive fitted with an entrance reducer and a screen to restrict robber bees. Bees from the colony learn to negotiate the space between the screen and the hive entrance. Robbers are attracted to hive odors and fly directly toward the screen where they are challenged by guard bees poised on their hind legs.

--Richard

Queen Mating Flights

Queen bees mate in flight. In areas where Africanized Honey Bee genes are not prevalent, honey bee queens are allowed to mate with drones in the area. These “open mated” queens typically receive genetic material from between 12 and 20 drones when they fly into drone concentration areas. Having a large number of drones in the area insures that the queens will pass along to their offspring a great number of traits for survival in a rapidly changing environment. Beekeepers can increase the number of drones with desirable traits available to mate with queens by increasing the amount of drone comb in hives with favored traits. By adding frames of drone brood foundation, beekeepers can designate certain hives as “drone mother” hives. The process of drone saturation can lead to improved genetics throughout the bee yard when new queens are reared by the beekeeper or when colonies naturally supersede their queen.

New queens are being reared in mating nucleus hives as shown in today’s picture. The queens emerge as adults on day 16 after rapidly progressing through the stages of egg, larva, and pupa. After waiting five or six days in the hive in which their reproductive organs continue to develop, virgin queens make mating flights. It is important that the queens return to their own hive; they will be killed if they wander into another hive. The beekeeper can help insure the queens find their proper hive by randomly placing the hives and altering the hives’ appearance with paint color and patterns. Hives here are pointed in opposite directions to allow virgin queens to orient toward a particular mating nucleus hive. After the queens return from their mating flights, they wait another five or six days while their reproductive organs continue developing before they begin laying eggs. Feeding the mating nucleus colonies throughout the two weeks of development after the queen’s emergence is important. A strong nectar flow also helps ensure the queens receive adequate nutrition during their development.

--Richard

Raising Queen Bees

A honey bee colony can’t be any better than its queen. We evaluate queens by observing the traits of the entire colony. Strong, healthy colonies reproduce by swarming in the spring. Beekeepers encourage bees to make new queens by setting up hives in the conditions that lead to swarming. To produce high-quality queens, it is necessary for the bees to come from good genetic lines, have good nutrition, and successfully mate with a number of high-quality drones. Shirley Murphy and I are participants in the Tennessee Queen Breeders Association, an effort of the Tennessee Beekeepers Association to develop queen bees adapted for the conditions of the Mid-South. In today’s photo Shirley is installing a queen cell housed in a protective cage in a full-size hive that she is requeening. She presses the queen cell into the side of a frame of mixed-age brood to resemble a supersedure queen cell. Similarly, Ed Anderson cuts off extra queen cells from his best Hendersonville, Tennessee bee hive to requeen another hive. Their queens will emerge inside the hives. After they make their mating flights, they will likely replace the old queens in mortal fight between the queens. Most colonies will accept any queen that emerges as an adult within the hive.

Shirley is also adding queen cells to queen mating nucleus hives. A “nuc" is any hive with less than the full capacity of a bee hive. Nucs often hold three, four, or five frames. We made up five-frame nucs with two frames of mixed-age brood and nurse bees from strong hives. The nurse bees will feed and care for the larvae in the open cells. The pupae in the capped brood will emerge soon to provide young worker bees to care for the new queen when she emerges from her queen cell. For food, we include in the nucleus hive a frame of honey and a frame of pollen. One empty frame of drawn comb provides for expansion of the prospective colony.

--Richard

Marking Queen Bees

After the new queen honey bee returns from a series of mating flights to the mating nucleus hive where she emerged as an adult a week earlier, she roams the combs for another week. Now, at about two weeks of age, the queen begins a life of egg laying. One queen is responsible for producing the entire population of the colony. The success of the colony depends upon the number of bees that she produces. The behavioral traits and many of the health characteristics of the colony are shaped by the genes shared by the queen and the drones she mated with. The organization of the colony as a social unit is built around the pheromones the queen secretes. If the beekeeper wants to control or improve the bee stock, it is important to identify the queen. Unless the queen is marked, there is no way to tell whether she has been replaced through supersedure. Colonies regularly replace their queen, often more frequently than the beekeeper realizes. Some races of honey bees continuously build queen cells as a survival strategy: A new queen is always readily available if needed. As long as the existing queen remains productive, laying plenty of eggs and producing ample pheromones, the extra queen cells are destroyed by the workers before new queens emerge.

The Russian queen held in a plastic marking tube was reared in a queen mating nucleus hive from a queen cell that I cut from the comb of one of my hives. By continuously evaluating queens, the beekeeper can choose ones that have the best traits for survival in the local region. Those are the queens one would like to have producing new generations of queens. This queen will be observed over her lifetime for over-winter survival of the colony, spring-time population buildup, behavior on the comb, brood pattern, honey production, and gentleness. The dot of white paint on her thorax will tell me that she has not been superseded.

--Richard

The Mating Nucleus Hive

Beekeepers typically produce their queen bees in small hives called queen mating nucleus hives. Nucleus hives are any hives that are smaller than full size bee hives. Honey bees produce queens anytime from spring through fall; however, they produce them in greater numbers in the spring. For the bees, this spring-time queen production matches their tendency to divide the colony and swarm. Beekeepers take advantage of the spring-time tendency to produce queens in order to expand their beekeeping operation or replace colonies lost over the winter. A queen cell is placed in a queen mating nucleus hive by the beekeeper two days before the queen emerges as an adult. Today’s photo shows a queen cell in a plastic protective holder, positioned vertically, pushed into the surface of the comb. The queen cell may have been developed from beekeeper-grafted larvae reared in a cell builder hive or produced by bees in an existing hive as a swarm cell or supersedure cell. Productive queens come from good genetic lines and receive complete nutrition and effective mating to high-quality drones.

The queen mating nucleus hive is a queenless colony set-up to care for a developing queen bee. The nucleus hive contains frames of nurse bees and brood. Capped brood contains pupae that will soon emerge as adults. These young adult workers produce food for the developing queen. Open brood emits strong pheromones to hold nurse bees in the mating nucleus hive. Frames of honey and pollen ensure the new queen receives nutritious food for proper development. After the virgin queen emerges from her cell as an adult, she roams the combs of the mating nucleus hive for five or six days. Then she makes a series of mating flights, mating in flight with 12 to 20 drones. Afterward, she flies back to the same nucleus hive. In five or six days, she begins to lay eggs. The beekeeper can then begin evaluating the quality of the queen in the mating nucleus hives.

--Richard

Marking Queen Bees

We can evaluate the quality of a queen honey bee by observing the colony over time. By simply observing the colony for several traits we can learn much about the queen. However, it is important to know if we are continually observing the same queen rather than another one that has superseded the original queen. A queen bee can live for several years, but some colonies replace their queen quite frequently. To keep track of the particular queen in a hive it is convenient to paint a colored marking on her thorax. If the queen is found again, her colored marking will identify her. If a queen is found without a marking, it can be assumed that this is a new queen that the colony has produced. A simple color code rotates every five years and indicates the queen’s age. This past year I found my longest-lived queen; she was four years old. I was delighted to find a queen that had survived for so long. It was especially useful to propagate her genes by grafting her larvae and allowing her drones to mate with other queens. Increasing queen bee longevity is one of the goals of Peace Bee Farm’s queen raising program.

In today’s photo Mary Phillips is marking a queen bee in the queen mating bee yard using a plastic tube covered with a plastic mesh. Mary gently holds the queen against the mesh and applies a dot of colored paint to the bee’s thorax. We mark the young queens in the mating nucleus hives after they have completed their mating flights and have begun to lay eggs. We don’t handle the queens until they are laying eggs, because they occasionally fly away. Once the queen bees are laying eggs, they are ready for the beekeeper to begin evaluating their performance. If they survive through the next winter, they may be selected to produce new queens.

--Richard

A Drone Laying Queen

For a queen bee to be worthwhile to the colony, at least three things must have come into play: She must have come from good genetic stock; she must have received adequate nutrition throughout her development, and she must have been mated with a number of healthy drones. If a queen does not lay a large number of eggs, she will not be able to sustain the colony’s population. If the colony recognizes that the queen is weak, it will replace her in a procedure called supersedure. In supersedure, the colony raises a new queen which takes over the egg laying after killing the old queen. If the colony does not recognize that their queen is not laying enough eggs, the colony may weaken and die. Generally, queens that lay a large number of eggs each day produce large amounts of pheromones which provide the organization of the colony.

As we examine the nucleus hives containing the new queens, we are constantly looking for indications of the quality of the queens. In the picture we see a queen who looks large and healthy; however, her brood pattern is very poor. There is a random, spotty pattern of brood with drone cells surrounded by empty cells. The queen is the bee in the lower center with a wasp-like abdomen and a dark, shiny thorax. I suspect that this queen reached the point following its emergence as an adult at which it would normally make mating flights only to find the daily rains prohibiting flight. Queens which don’t make the mating flights lack sperm and cannot lay the fertile eggs necessary to produce workers or queens. They produce drones from infertile eggs. Drones alone cannot sustain a colony. This queen will have to be replaced.
--Richard

Young Queens Expand Colonies

The young queen bees that were successfully mated in the queen mating yard are expanding their colonies. After the queens completed their mating flights, they continued to grow and develop for several days. After about a week, most of the queens had begun to lay eggs. Some started by laying several eggs in the same cell. Some wandered around the comb and placed an egg in a cell in a random pattern. Other queens started their egg laying by only laying infertile eggs which become drones. Most of the queens that had successfully mated with between 12 and 20 drones settled down to laying eggs in a continuous pattern within a couple more days. These queens were finally laying eggs across the frames in the brood nest in a large and continuous pattern. The queens will be held in the nucleus hives for several weeks. During this time, the brood pattern will be observed to help evaluate the effectiveness of the queen’s egg laying. A good queen may produce over 1500 eggs per day. If the queen does not lay a large number of eggs, she will not be able to grow the colony to overcome the losses caused by the worker bees’ relatively short life span of 42 days. Weak nucleus colonies will not be moved into full-size hives for production.

These queen bees were raised in nucleus hives, which are small hives. As the populations of these colonies rise, additional space must be made available. This is accomplished in these hives by adding a second story. The nucleus hives are scattered about the queen mating yard to assist the queens in finding their own hive when returning from mating flights. Here we see several nucleus hives that have been placed under a wing of an old barn. The two-story hives will soon be transferred to full-size hives.
--Richard

Installing a Nucleus Colony

There are several ways for a person to start a hive of honey bees. The simplest way is for one person to purchase an established colony from another beekeeper. Another method of starting a colony is to capture a swarm of bees. This can be done when the bees naturally swarm to propagate on a colony-wide basis. These bees can be removed from a tree limb or a structure, such as a mail box. A feral colony of bees can be removed, usually with great effort, from a hollow tree or from within the walls of a house or building. Beekeepers can divide a colony and add a second queen in a method that is similar to swarming. Honey bees are often purchased from a bee breeder in a packaged form. With a package, a caged queen bee is delivered in a ventilated box along with about three pounds of bees, roughly 12,000 bees. Another method of establishing a bee hive is for one to purchase a nucleus colony. A nucleus colony consists of several frames of bees taken from the brood area of an established honey bee nest. The frames will contain brood and an egg-laying queen bee. A nucleus colony is already established as a colony organized around the queen bee’s pheromones. It is ready to rapidly expand the colony size for honey production or pollination service.

Here we see beekeeper Dallas Holland setting up a new hive with frames of brood and bees from a nucleus colony. The five-frame nucleus colony that she purchased was delivered in the white box. She is placing the frames into a ten-frame hive body along with five empty frames. The bees will rapidly expand to fill each of the ten frames with brood and bees. You can see in the bottom of Dallas’ hive the screened bottom board that is used as part of an Integrated Pest Management program. Dallas has chosen bees bred for resistance to several known pests. Her efforts are in keeping with a growing trend toward returning to more natural, largely chemical-free beekeeping techniques.
--Richard

Not All Queens are Good

We evaluate the queen bees in the queen mating nucleus hives. This allows us to know what the condition of a queen is before placing her into a full-size hive for pollination service or honey production. It is important that the queen is laying a large number of eggs and placing them in a tight, continuous pattern on the frames. A good queen will lay in excess of 1500 eggs per day. This level of egg laying is necessary to produce a large enough population of bees to produce some surplus honey. It is the beekeeper’s job to ensure that each colony has an acceptable queen.

While checking new queen bees in the mating nucleus hives, I found this one. The colony was gentle and still well populated with bees that I had placed in the hive when I established this nucleus colony. However, there was no evidence that the queen was laying worker brood. Only drone brood was found. Capped drone cells stand taller than worker cells and look like bullets on the frames. Click on the photo, and you can see the queen in the lower center. While she looks healthy, she was probably not properly mated in the days following her emergence as an adult. Rain falling on a number of consecutive days could have prevented her from making her mating flights. Without sperm, the queen could only lay infertile eggs which produce drones. If left in place, this colony would be doomed to dwindle away. I will replace this queen.
--Richard

Evaluating New Queen Bees

As social insects, honey bees share the responsibility for the reproduction of the entire colony with two types of bees, queens and drones. Each colony has one queen, and she lays all of the eggs for the entire colony. The success and condition of the entire colony is largely dependent upon the condition of the queen. Reproduction in honey bees is accomplished by the queen, a female, mating with a number of male bees, drones. Typically, the queen will mate a few days after she emerges as an adult bee. The event is a series of flights in which she mates in the air with between 12 and 20 drones.

There are a number of factors that determine the quality of the queen. The success of the mating flight is one. The genetic make-up of the queen is another. A third is the nutrition that the queen received throughout her development and after her emergence as an adult. Each of these factors combines to determine the condition of the brood that the queen produces. Another factor affecting the brood production is the genetics of the several drones that mated with the queen. Whenever we examine the nucleus hives housing the new queens, we are evaluating her condition. We look for behavioral conditions like gentleness, how rapidly the queen produces brood, and the bees’ resistance to diseases and pests. Much can be told about the condition of the queen by examining the brood pattern. Click on the photo to see an excellent brood pattern of capped brood. This is a large area of continuous brood with very few empty cells. The capped cells contain the third stage of the developing honey bees, the pupa.
--Richard

Young Geese and Queen Bees

Just as fresh strawberries in the farmers market are a sign that spring has arrived, life abounds on the farm. Today, while I was checking queen mating nucleus hives, located close to one of the Peace Farm lakes, a pair of wild Canada geese swam in close for a look. They were accompanied by their two new offspring. Today was the first day that the birds brought their young out into open water. Geese produce their young in March and April. They seem to ensure their survival by overwhelming the predators by having their offspring at the same time. The springtime births also ensure that there will be strong birds capable of migrating in the fall. We try to accomplish the same tactic in the bee yard that the Canada geese take on naturally. We encourage the bees to increase their numbers in the spring. We raise as many queens as we can in the spring while conditions in the hives are most conducive for the bees to produce queens. Hopefully, we can overcome predators, parasites, pesticides, and other maladies to be able to produce enough healthy bees to make a surplus of honey to feed the bees throughout next winter.

The small hives in the foreground are queen mating nucleus hives. The entrances of each hive face in opposite directions. This orientation helps queen bees returning from mating flights to enter the proper hive. If a returning queen enters the wrong hive, it will be detected as an intruder and killed. The bricks on the tops of the hives hold the covers in place during wind storms and nighttime visits by raccoons. The bricks also provide the beekeeper a hive condition code at a glance. The alignment of these bricks tells me that these hives each hold an egg-laying queen.
--Richard

New Queen Bees Emerge

We raise new queen bees in small hives called queen mating nucleus hives. These hives house the bees necessary to care for a new queen bee until she is able to lay enough eggs to sustain an entire colony. The bees in this hive maintain a temperature in the brood area where the queen cell is located at about 95 degrees. Once the queen has emerged from her queen cell, the nurse bees and attendant bees will continuously feed and tend to her. After a few days the new queen will make her mating flights from this hive. A significant step in the raising of new queen bees is checking to see if the queen successfully emerged from her queen cell. In the photo we can see two queen cells in which the queen successfully chewed her way out of the end of the cells. The cells were started with a larva grafted into the plastic queen cell cups. The bees in a starter colony drew out the beeswax cells in the shape of peanuts. The peanut-shaped cells were held in the queen mating nucleus hive in the orange-colored protectors.

The generally shy and reclusive queen will remain in the hive for about five days after emerging as an adult bee from the queen cell. During this time she will seek out any other queens or queen cells and kill them. Next, she will make one or more mating flights in which she breeds with a number of drone bees. The queen must then find her way back to the correct hive. She should be ready to start laying eggs after a few days. Once the queen is laying eggs, this nucleus hive will become the start of a new colony of honey bees.
--Richard

Raising Queen Bees

Every honey bee colony has a queen bee. For the beekeeper to expand the bee yard or to have extra queens for requeening colonies, new queens must be raised. We can assist the bees in the production of queens, but only the bees can produce a queen. They do it by feeding a special food, called royal jelly, to the developing brood on the fourth day of development. This is the day that the egg becomes a larva. Fertile eggs will develop into worker bees if fed a normal diet, but they will develop into queens if continually fed royal jelly. Beekeepers start this process of queen development into motion by moving these young larvae into hives of bees set-up to feed and care for the larvae. The method of moving the larvae is called grafting. The bees build queen cells around the developing queen larvae.

The queen cells are next moved to queen mating nucleus hives like the one in the picture. Here, the queen cell is cared for by the bees. They will also feed and tend to the new queen once she emerges as an adult. She will make her mating flight from this hive. To help her find her own hive, we paint each mating nucleus hive a different color. A screen barrier outside the hive’s entrance helps prevent robber bees from entering. This process of setting up queen cells in mating nucleus hives mimics the procedures that bees regularly perform in nature.
--Richard

The Jesters, Remarkable Beekeepers

I ran into Kevin and Pratima Jester of Jester Bee Company this morning. They had just unloaded four hundred nucleus colonies of honey bees at their headquarters in West Ridge, Arkansas. They drove non-stop through the night from their Florida operation where they had raised these bees. The nucleus colonies will be used by beekeepers in the Mid-South, Mid-West, and New England to establish bee hives. The Jesters raise the bees in the Deep South to get the populations of bees established earlier than is possible in cooler areas.

The Jesters are remarkably imaginative and industrious beekeepers. Like many beekeepers, they lost a large portion of their bees in 2007 to the condition known as Colony Collapse Disorder. While the cause of this condition is not yet known, the Jesters have been working to keep healthy bees and to regrow their business. They have developed some products to help beekeepers meet the honey bees’ nutritional needs. The Jesters are like a number of beekeepers who are experimenting with methods to keep the honey bees healthy. Beekeepers will want to save the address: jesterbee.com.
--Richard