overwintered mini nucs 2015-2016

[Jon]

Anyone else overwintering mini nucs?
I still have 9 with an active cluster out of a dozen I started with last October.
These ones are in double apideas.

[mbc]

2568
Here's me zapping varroa on one of my overwintering miniplus hives, this one's on double brood. I believe I have about 17 still extant, only one or two confirmed deaths so far but I'm not counting chickens and I haven't looked into some of the boxes at all, just zapped and moved on. If I recall correctly, I put about 23 of these mini hives into the winter, time will tell wether this will be worth repeating on a larger scale.

[The Drone Ranger]

9 left now mostly double keiler

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[mbc]

I think its fairly safe to count the chickens now.
My final score is 14 rapidly expanding mini plus colonies out of 23 put in to winter. They were at varying strength with varying amounts of effort and resources put in to bringing them through, two of the survivors were just forgotten nucs left to their own devices after harvesting the last planned queens from them, they look as good as any with the queens (from emergency cells raised in a smallish colony) looking fat and going like the clappers. Generally those given cells, some thymol, had good bee numbers and a drop of syrup, were more likely to make it through.
Overall the winter was very kind with nary a full size colony lost, apart from the inevitable odd one with q issues, so I think I'll wait until we've had a hard winter on the bees before deciding if its worthwhile to keep overwintering bees on this small frame format.

[The Drone Ranger]

Well played mbc
Up here I wouldn't say we were out of the woods yet
The weather is to be cold and nasty for a while just at the wrong time



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