NJ Nucleus Colonies

When making NJ Local Nucleus Colonies while coming into spring we take frames of new brood and eggs from strong New World Carniolan hives, which have made it through the winter, and move them to small 5-frame boxes and then add an overwintered New World Carniolan queen. We make sure this added queen is accepted and also that she is laying a good egg pattern. This could take up to 2 weeks to all work out.

This new new split or nucleus or nuc is then continually fed sugar syrup, and usually by June has grown to up to (20) thriving frames of eggs, brood, new honey and pollen. Sometime a new nucleus will produce enough extra honey which could be harvested but generally the main focus is get this new nucleus hive ready for the upcoming winter so they have enough bees and stored honey to make it through the winter.

Now at the strong hives which we took the frames from for the nucleus-splits we replace the empty frame spaces with new frames. The strong hive’s honeybees begin to draw out the new frames with newly formed beeswax hexagon cells in which their queen will lay new eggs, the worker bees will fill with pollen and newly harvested nectar. They usually recover very well and we usually are able to harvest anywhere from 25 to 110 pounds of honey per hive.

There are a number of reasons why we make splits:

**Make replacement hives for hives that did not make it through the winter

**Make additional hives to increase our beekeeping operation’s size

**Make splits to sell for added revenue

**Reduce the swarming tendency of the strong hive. So by taking a specific number of frames from a strong hive it is possible we may prevent from swarming in late April to early May. Swarming is nature’s way of increasing the number of hives. The issue is that when half of a hive swarms it could take a 2-4 weeks for the remaining strong hive to recover.