This is a comb from a mating nuc which we ran without frames as a trial; it may represent a change of approach for us in future years as it presents a lovely option for growing the colony on into a larger hive....
Yet again we have a scratch-built comb with the cell walls orientated opposite to the 'text book' position. This is a comb from a mating nuc which we ran without frames as a trial; it may represent a change of approach for us in future years as it presents a lovely option for growing the colony on into a larger hive.... By using top-bars we're able to transfer the mating nuc combs into empty frames, the bees then follow the existing comb and fill out the frame. At a later point these unwired combs can be replaced but initially they present an opportunity to create new colonies very cheaply
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Spent some time transferring queen cells into their mating nucs today, this batch will hopefully mate as successfully as the previous ones; such great weather for getting queens mated.
You'll notice that we don't use the plastic cell cups which are so popular these days; nothing against them but I can make wax cups as quickly as I can clean the plastic ones and I get a lot more enjoyment out of making them than I ever did when I had to clean the plastic ones. Also, I'm guaranteed to loose the plastic cups the moment that I put them down somewhere! It may seem that all of our queens are of an orange variety, giving rise to the usual mixed appearance of the workers that we become so used to seeing but occasionally we find a throwback to a more uniform appearance, in this case the entire colony has a dark look about it, very 'carnica' like.
Below is a photo of the frames that they're on at present; a very basic construction put together out of cheap timber using our frame assembly jig which we blogged about last year. We over wintered them on five of these half size frames (approx area equal to two and a half langstroth combs) in an OSB box. At present they're being used to build more mating nuc combs for use in July. Back in the spring we did a short post about some small mating nucs which we'd built entirely from scrap wood; small off-cuts which were far too small for anything else we could think of at the time. We're now seeing the first of them finally put into use... Always lovely to see a new queen laying.
Total cost in financial terms? A few pence for the nails and a tiny amount of syrup just to give them a foothold when they were initially made up. |
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