Moving an Apidea to a nuc.

[Jon]

I have an over wintered apidea which has done really well and I built it up to a stack 4 high, the base apidea and 3 apidea supers, 20 apidea frames total.
It has a queen mated in September from my garden.
Today I took a brood frame from a colony I also have in the garden which had emerging brood. After shaking all the bees off, I transferred this to a correx box and added a frame of drawn comb and a frame half filled with honey. The rest of the space was blocked off with a polystryrene dummy board, so effectively just a 3 frame nuc.
I put this box on the site of the apidea and shook all the bees from the apidea frames into the box. I saw the queen which I marked and clipped a few days ago and I let her walk off the apidea frame she was on down on to the frame with the brood on it.
There was more than enough bees to cover three frames, especially with the weather we have at the moment. There were 12 frames with brood in the apidea and I stacked these up in apidea supers above the feed hole in the crown board of the colony I took the brood frame from. I will remove these plus the bees which have moved up to cover the frames in order to make up a few apideas which will get queen cells next week.

That's the plan anyway. In about a week I will remove the frame with the emerging brood, which should have hatched and be covered with eggs and small larvae, and replace it with another frame of sealed or emerging brood. I reckon I can have this built up to about 6 frames within a fortnight.

I did the morphometry on the apidea in November and this is a good queen which might be worth grafting from.
Need to see her in a bigger colony.

[Rosie]

Hi Jon

About a week ago I "doctored" a standard national super so that it was divided into two chambers with sloping sides which were the same angle as my mini-nucs. This was so that I can put it over a national brood box, above a queen excluder, to get the combs drawn out before putting them into mini-nucs. I did not think of it at the time but, reading your post, it occurs to me that it can be used to get bees from a mini-nuc stack to a national by putting the frames back in there complete with bees and queen and then bailey changing them into a standard brood box.

Rosie

[Jon]

Adam D has a similar system I think for getting apidea frames drawn out above a super. I remember he posted something about it on the old bbka forum.

I have about 60+ apidea frames already drawn out and I fumigated them with acetic acid to make sure any nosema spores were killed.
I am buying another 10 apideas shortly from your Bibba mate Mr Jones. Should see him tomorow as we have Meg Seymour over for a demonstration at our apiary and he is on the list.

I think it is good to have a little brood in the apideas in order to anchor the bees and I would put one frame with some brood on it into each apidea I make up. I have more than 70 cells hatching between Thursday and Sunday next week. Got to make the most of this perfect grafting weather.

[Adam]

Jon, you're correct!
The picture has been sadly lost (destroyed) by the BBKA in their infinite wisdom so it's not on that forum any more (I do have it somewhere though).

The plan was to populate 22 of my plywood-mini-nuc frames; ideally with some brood and stores. The bees didn't do as they were told despite a stiff warning so I didn't get any brood in them that way, just some stores. The colony they were on decided to swarm very early and I found queencells in the tiny gap between the two parallel sets of small frames. (I'd blocked it off but not quite enough).

11 of these frames is just about the size of a 5 frame super, so enough bees to grow downwards into a 5 frame nuc. Once there's some eggs on the brood frames, a queen excluder can keep the queen down and then the small frames can be lifted off and used as they are full of stores by this time. In fact, once the queen is down, continual feeding means that the space above the queen excluder is filled with stores so forces the queen down as fast as is reasonably possible.

Two of my overwintered queens on these 140 x 140 frames were put on queenless colonies - newspaper uniting through the feed-hole of the crown board, then queen excluder in between a week later - So those frames were removed full of stores a little while ago.

[Adam]

Here's the picture of the super which I modified to get some of my mini-frames in.1084
The dress in the photo IS NOT MINE. HONEST!

[fatshark]

The dress in the photo IS NOT MINE. HONEST!

Are you sure? I can see five dresses in the photo. Me thinks you do protest too much ;-)

[Adam]

Well alright then, I admit it. Mine is the pink one.