In this episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey walks viewers through his 2021 overwintered nuc program. He explains that the operation targets 40‑60 nucs each winter, using a proprietary F1 queen line bred from an F0 mother. Nucs are established in early July with at least one frame of brood, one frame of stores, and a mated queen, then built up to a 6‑over‑6 poly‑nuc configuration (a standard 6‑frame nuc topped with a 6‑frame box) giving 12 brood frames by October. All varroa treatments are applied before the autumn feeding period, and the colonies are closed for winter, with a final oxalic treatment around Christmas. Edwards emphasizes feeding with fondant in fall and 2:1 syrup at year‑end, but notes that well‑stocked nucs rarely need supplemental feed. He demonstrates queen marking in small colonies, monitors mating success (38/40 mated in the first round), and outlines a split strategy to reach the 60‑nuc quota, adding queen cells where needed. The video also covers the commercial side: deposits for overwintered nucs are taken in September‑October, and the nucs sell out every year due to their gentle, disease‑resistant heritage, making them ideal for beginner beekeepers. Throughout, Edwards stresses tailoring management to the end goal—overwintering versus honey production—rather than following generic rule‑books.
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Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to give you a quick look through my 2021 overwintered nucs. So it may seem a little bit early, I always get a really, really kind of good start on the season with my overwintered nucs. We aim to take between 40 and 60 overwintered nucs through the winter, And try and limit the amount that die during the winter. We have a really good success with the amount that we can get through using a number of different poly nucs, and I think the key to our success is the fact that we use a good strain of bee. So all of our queens are F1, bred by us to an F1 from an F0 mother, and then the fact that we start them off really, really early in the season. It's early July at the moment, and that's when I like to have my nucs set up. I like to have the queens mated by then. I like to have at least one frame of brood, some stores, and I can feed them straight away. That means they've got plenty of time to build up into a strong colony. I'm not rushing at the last minute to get them up to a size where they can suitably overwinter. So like I say, we're at the beginning of July, we've got one frame of brood and at least one frame of stores. Some of them are bigger than that at the moment, and I'll have to keep them in check by taking brood out of those and balancing other hives. So As long as I've got some strong colonies, some weaker colonies, I can balance them and get them all to the position whereby they're going into winter and they're on at least 6 frames of brood. Now that might seem strange for a 6-frame nuc having 6 frames of brood, but the way that I overwinter them, and I'll show you in the video here, is I actually overwinter them on a 6-over-6 format. It's exactly the same format that I use for collecting swarms in bait hives. And that is a standard 6-frame poly nuc and then another 6-frame box on top to give me 12 brood frames in total. Now I don't care whether the 3 frames are at the top and 3 frames at the bottom, or it's just 6 frames at the bottom and honey above, doesn't matter to me. What I'm looking for is 6 frames, full frames of brood in these colonies come around October time. And at October time All of my treatments are finished, all of my feeding is finished. I can close up those colonies and I don't need to go back into them until kind of around Christmas time when I do my oxalic varroa treatment. And then at that point, I can look into them as well, assess where they are in terms of feed, and if I need to, I can give them some fondant. So in this video, we're just going to take a quick look in. I'll show you the queens, I'll show you where they've just got mated and just started to lay that worker brood. And just to give you that snapshot of where they are early July. And then we're going to follow this up later on in the season, maybe kind of middle of August, back end of August, and show you how well these nucs have come on and how strong they need to be to successfully overwinter them in this format. So I'll get my suit on and we'll take a look. So it's rubbish weather here today. Again, we should have beautiful summer weather with really nice flows. And it's just like 15 degrees and overcast and rainy, so the bees aren't getting out much. I'm going around just checking that all of my nucs are mated though, and if they're not mated and they turn into laying workers, I can go in and do an interaction with them. Good news is though, is I've got really excellent success on my mating this year. I've done a full round and I'm on 38 out of 40 on the first round that's mated. So that's really, really good. Very, very happy with that indeed. So we're just going to take a look in a couple of these boxes and show you what they look like. So this is what the bees are looking like at the moment. 3 frames of bees there, maybe, maybe just 4 frames of bees. They're not very happy about me opening them up because it is raining quite heavily now, but I just want to give you a kind of snapshot as to what they look like on the 3rd of July, so then you can see how they grow over the year. and then what they look like going into winter. So I'll pull a couple of frames out. You can see the queen, then you can see the worker brood as well. Not sure how well the camera is going to get that. You can see there, though, fully laid up with eggs. And there we have the first round of worker brood. This pattern will improve over the year. That is the first round. So you always kind of say if it's first round, you give them another go at it. That's pretty good though for a first round. Come back here in 3 weeks and you'll see, be able to kind of assess the pattern properly. Again, none of that brood is capped there, but you can quite clearly see nice pattern, lots and lots of uncapped brood there. Come back in a few days, that'll be fully capped. That's the 3rd frame of brood that we've got. And then we've got a really nice heavy frame of capped stores as well. So the bees are doing well, they're bringing in enough food, they're already thinking about how they're getting prepared for wintering. They're bringing in the food to see them through the long winter months. So there's the queen, she's darting around a bit. She's there, it's not marked yet. She's an absolute spitting image of her mother, with orange higher up towards the wings and then darker as you get down towards where she's going to lay her eggs. Almost identical to her mother. What I would always suggest this time of the year when the colonies are small, get them marked. Makes it so much easier when they're really small colonies like this. Very rarely that I can't find a queen in a colony this size. In a big colony when they're swarming, never find them. It's so difficult. So take advantage of the colony being small. Keep your pen always in your top pocket with your cage. That wasn't set up, that genuinely is always there. And mark your queens when you get the opportunity. So there's the marked queen now. Really nice, healthy F1 marked queen bred by us here in North Wales. Just want to show you the inside of this straight away. It's early July here, but yeah, we're feeding our nucs. Why wouldn't we? We don't cross-contaminate between any of our honey supers. These are destined to overwinter, so we'll treat them early for varroa. We won't do an autumn treatment because you do an autumn treatment to align with your honey supers. If you do a treatment earlier in the year, you knock them back and then you do another treatment in autumn when the varroa is the worst. So you're just kind of disrupting that life cycle as best as you possibly can. So these will receive a treatment over the next week or so, and we're feeding them fondant now to keep them going just in case there's any lean spots. And then we'll feed them with 2:1 syrup at the end of the year. But we find that it's very rare that our nucs do need feeding. They don't need to create a huge amount of stores for themselves, and they can kind of go out and forage that for themselves. And if they get a good run on the ivy, they get more than enough food. But I think that's a really important note to kind of end on, is that you need to plan your strategy. We've been over strategies previously, but don't blindly follow the rule book which says you do your varroa treatment at the end of the summer. The reason that rule book is designed in that way is so you can take your honey off. So overwintered nucs, if you're preparing them solely for overwintering, you can feed them, you can do your varroa treatments, you can do absolutely everything to them because all you're trying to get out of that is a colony through to the next year. So you need to do what's best for the colony, not what's best for you as the beekeeper trying to take the honey away from them. Now, if this was a colony in April and I had a nuc that I was building up for honey production that year, I definitely wouldn't be feeding them if they had sufficient stores, and I definitely wouldn't be doing any kind of varroa treatments or anything that could risk contamination to the honey supers. So it's horses for courses. You need to understand what your end goal is and tailor your strategy to meet that end goal. So I've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 nucs in this colony here. I've got a couple over there that aren't mated yet. In total, we're going for 60 nucs this year, and we're pretty much at our quota already for that. So what I will do is, some of them are really strong, some of them are on 7 frames of brood already on double boxes. So all we'll do for them is we'll split them and add either a queen cell from one of our colonies or a mated queen cell from another colony. And that will give us our quota going into the year. So we'll follow up this video later on in the year With an update as to how these overwintered nucs for 2021 are getting along. And if you're interested in buying one, we start taking deposits for them around September, October in 2020, and we sell out every single year without fail. The overwintered nucs are in huge demand, especially really good quality overwintered nucs that come from a known heritage. They're calm, they're gentle, they're really good disease-resistant bees, they produce a lot of honey, Great for beekeeping in your garden. It's exactly the kind of nuc that you want when you're getting into beekeeping as a beginner. So that's it for today's video. Hope you've enjoyed it. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.
