Bees - nucleus or artificial swarm?

[Plot17B]

Hiya,
On the back of Crichmond's comment on the other active bee thread (http://www.growfruitandveg.co.uk/gra...rls_25219.html)...............

Our fellow beekeeper on the lottie lost his naturally swarmed colony midsummer, leaving us with just my colony ticking along. He's preparing himself to set up again in spring, as is a new person to whom we passed on a complete hive to (Thanks to my eagle-eyed Freecycle watching!). So that will make 3 hives total if all goes to plan.

Well, we've been planning to use brood frames from my overwintered colony to set up theirs. My queen, and thus the bees, are placid, productive and healthy so makes sense to propagate their genetic pool.

So the question is, artificial swarm or nucleus building? If we were just setting one hive up, artificial swarm makes sense, but as we want to establish two, would making 2 or 3 small nuclei using the old polystyrene boxes approach and homemade frames be a better approach? I'm conscious that I don't want to impact my colony by losing more than a couple of frames max and the importance of keeping a nucleus small enough that the transferred brood can be temperature maintained for correct larval development as the colony slowly expands. Of course, the safest way for my hive would/could be x1 artificial swarm and just try to locate a natural swarm for the 3rd hive!

I'm reading up, thinking and checking out the other forums, but any thoughts on the subject from GYOers?????
Cheers P17B

P.S. Apologies to non-beekeepers for the terms used above. Swarms are just nature's way of splitting existing bee colonies and thus increasing the number of individual populations in the wild. An artificial swarm is where the beekeeper moves part of his colony into a new hive using jiggerpokery to fool the bees into believing they have just naturally swarmed. A nucleus is effectively a mini-hive built in a small dedicated box with wax comb on wooden frames, from where you can build up a brand new colony with a new queen. Breeding husbandry in effect. Hope that helps demistify things...????

[BrideXIII]

I got the gist, and very interesting it was, but as a non beekeeper no valid advice.

although a question?
in nature when a swarm slits off from the hive, how far away would they move?

will that impact if you go for the artificial nucleus?

[Mcbee]

I'm presuming that this is all going to happen in the spring rather than now?!

I think that i'd wait for Queen cells to show in yours and then go for a nuc. Or put unsealed brood in a queenless colony / nuc and hope that they draw out a queen cell. Eitherway you'll need to wait until your queen is laying - which might not be for a while yet.

Also, I,m not sure if i understood you properly but are you talking about creating 2 nus's from your hive? if you are, my concern would be that you might be taking too much brood out of your colony and it could impact on your crop.

Good luck with whatever you do. My bees disappeared last year and I'm reluctant to get anymore yet. 1 week they were really healthy, full of larvae brood etc, and then they just all went leaving the brood.
Really wierd as there were literally only a handful of bees left. I never had that happen before - i was gutted!

[Plot17B]

Hi BrideXIII - how far would a natural swarm travel? Could be to the nearest tree or a mile or so away, depends where they find a good nest potential and good nearby forage (some bees leave the swarm and search, returning to encourage the swarm to go to their new found location. The more bees that return positive to that location, eventually a "threshold" is reached & the swarm "up's and off's" and would try to settle there permanently if beekeepers did not then grab and hive them first!! It shouldn't be a major problem with the existing hive if they were close though.

And Hello McBee...Yes, don't worry, just thinking stage! Colony hunkered down and no intervention action planned until April I guess. But want to be confident of my strategy and get equipment ready over next 2 months (with a baby due in just weeks, getting everything straight now with work/bees/lottie before have no time to do owt).

Agree about risk of impacting my own colony by taking too much brood. That's my core fear. Am interesting in the queen rearing as alternative, but as novices at that, unsure of potential success rates or if it is "wrong" solution for this problem. Gut feel is to create nuc from a frame of brood for 1st and find natural swarm for 2nd. But encouraged you seem to agree that broadly creating a nuc is a good approach.

Appreciate your thoughts & experience here and sorry to hear of your colony loss. We are v attached to our girls and dread a similar loss. Interesting also how many of the fellow allotmentiers (sp?) come and ask about our girls' health - they are all seriously concerned too!
Thanks again. P17B

[Mcbee]

Yes, don't worry, just thinking stage! Colony hunkered down and no intervention action planned until April I guess. But want to be confident of my strategy and get equipment ready over next 2 months (with a baby due in just weeks, getting everything straight now with work/bees/lottie before have no time to do owt).

Just checking!

The only thing that i would say about creating a nuc from a frame of brood is that some people have reseravtions. Some of the beekeepers i know say that it is far better to create a nuc form a queen cell that the bees have already started. Their locic is that the grub has been treated as a queen right from the outset so has had the royal jelly etc.

If you start a nuc by putting a queenless brood frame (into a queenless nuc) then as long as there are uncapped larvae the bees should be able to create a queen. However this would have spent its first few days in development as a "worker" and so won't have been fed as a queen. Consequently, when it hatches it might not be as good a queen as you'd hoped.

You might also have to keep an eye out for multiple queen cells. Personally i think I'd wait for a queen cell to develope in the main hive, and use this to create the nuc.