Swarms & Nucleus Hives
- KatyAnn Dudley
- May 18, 2016
- 4 min read
Updated: May 15, 2020
I went back home to visit my family over Christmas break and while I was there I noticed five bee hives that were in 'winter-over' mode. I went back to school, finished testing and now I'm back for the summer and I come home to see seventeen hives in our front yard!
I live on a small family farm of a little under 25 acres, but mostly the lower 15 are used for goats and fowl, hoop house gardening and bee keeping, we try to keep everything around here organic, although we haven't asked the USDA to certify it, it's in our best interest to keep everything we eat as healthy and natural as possible.
Our property happens to lay in a little valley with proliferate amounts of flora around through the woods and fields that surround us. Despite the amazing amount of potential for pollen and nectar flow, over the past few years we were in drought and then suddenly last year we had an over abundance of rain which washed away a lot of the prime pollen at the time.
This year, however, has been rather wonderful. Winter had a few odd days here of over 80 degrees (F), and through Spring and into Summer, it's stayed temperate, the high temperatures so far staying under ninety... which is not common at all here. I'm not complaining and neither are the buzz-buzzes.
This will be the fourth year my family has lived on this plot of land and we've owned bees for only three of those. One year of drought, one year of too much rain, so is this amount of pollen and this incredible amount of hive growth this year really how it's supposed to be? We'll be selling a few nucleus hives (nucs; pronounced "nuke") soon, but that will still leave us with a +7 hive number than we had just last year!
Nucleus Colonies, or "nucs", are small honey bee colonies created from a larger preexisting hive. These separations may be taken from the original hive to cut down numbers. This is effective for mite/pest control, prevention of swarms, older beeks (a short name for beekeepers) who prefer smaller hives, etc. Nucs can also be used to capture already swarmed hives. Capturing swarms and putting them in a nuc allows them to adjust to their new home and boom, you've got a new hive already. Nuc refers both to the smaller box size and the transferred honeybees within it.
Any hive is as strong as its foundation: the queen. When a hive swarms, they usually split 40/60. The percent that is leaving (swarming) takes the living queen with them. That's why you'll see them clumped on a tree somewhere as they search for a new home. Somewhere in the middle of all that mess, they're protecting the queen. The percent that is still in the original hive has already, by that time, created a new queen cell that will take over as 'her ladyship' when she hatches. Now from your one hive, you now have two!
When you have swarms it can cut down on honey production, obviously because half the hive just split apart, but the main concern is giving the bees enough honey to last through the winter, so during the summer, if you have a goal to sell honey, then obviously swarms aren't great, but they grow quickly in the right conditions.
As you might expect though, nuc hives are very vulnerable. They are in a box much smaller than other larger hives, containing only four to six frames in it for the first few days, and there are far fewer bees in them than a neighboring colony at 100%. Depending on the health and timing of the nuc, they may have to be fed by the beek for a few days by ways of a sugar solution. This is dangerous sometimes though as the larger hives see an easy chance to steal a meal and may entirely kill out the newly establishing hive by breaking-n-entering (aka: robbing... original naming aye?), stealing all their nectar, honey, syrup and will kill any rival bees that attempt to defend the nuc. Robbing can lead to the starvation of a nuc in days.
While bees can harm another colony because there are easy resources available, there are ways to prevent much damage. Making the entrance from the porch of the bee hive the width of one bee can make it more difficult for another hive to rob a nuc.
In the picture at the top of the page (some of the hives back home), you can see a nuke off to the very far right of that photo. See what I mean now about being small and easy pickings?
As an ending comment, I included a short little article down below about a recent report on CCD in Oklahoma. Check it out!
Interesting news report from News On 6 about CCD in OK:
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