Description
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What is A Nucleus Colony?
Nuc (pronounced “Nuke”) is short for hive nucleus. A nuc is a 5-frame starter colony of honeybees with a queen. The 5 deep frames contain worker bees, drawn comb, a laying queen, eggs, larvae, and sealed and emerging brood. Nucs do not include the beehive boxes.
Packages can be installed into any type of hive, while nucs are limited to deep Langstroth boxes only.
To produce these nucs, we either split a colony and grow it onto 5 frames, or install a package into one of our nuc boxes and grow the bees onto 5 deep frames.
The advantage of a nucleus colony is that we help the bees get through the tricky spring weather fluctuations before we sell them to you. That way, there is a greater chance they will thrive/surviv
These come with a health certificate, upon request. They are guaranteed to be disease-free for 30 days. Please report any queen issues within 10 days.
Check out THIS POST for information about the nuc pickups. You will need to bring a hive and transfer the bees into your equipment during the pickup.
VIDEO Transferring A Nuc
Siput –
I had a similar prelbom here in California. As soon as I put sugar syrup in the hive so they could overwinter the small black ants appeared in numbers. Some other google searches suggested vaseline lines, which does work, but you have to keep it fresh as the ants have a habit of sacrificing a few soldiers and walking over their bodies. Eventually I ordered boric acid online, mixed it with sugar water and placed it in a can with some black mosquito mesh over it to stop the bees from getting in. I placed these ant traps near the hives. The commercial traps that you buy didn’t seem to work at all. Anyway the home made traps really worked well, the ants were diverted to boric acid traps and left the hives alone, and then eventually they died off from feeding the boric acid to their young.
Brent –
We had much success with our nuc! It produced 60 pounds of honey, plus what they needed for winter. The classes were helpful and I wish there was more!