👉 Making Nucs in April or May – How Small Can You Go?

In this video, I'm going to show you just how small you can make your splits in spring. I'm going to show you inside this split here that's just got 2 frames of bees, a queen, and a little bit of stores. Believe it or not, that is all you need to produce a big, strong bumper colony if you do it at the right time of the year. Making splits later on in the year is far more difficult, and I'll give you a few tips at the end of the video if you're making your splits later on in the year. But let's get inside this split here and see just how small you can make up a nuc at the beginning of the So these 3 colonies on this stand here were just one colony a couple of days ago. It was based in the middle and it was a 6-frame Langstroth nuc. I split all of these 3 beehives up and I just put 2 frames in each. I was aiming for 1 frame of brood, 1 frame of stores, and then I wanted roughly even distribution between the 3 nucs in terms of bees. Only one of the 3 splits can get the queen and the queen is in this nuc here. Now in order to make sure that you're balancing the bees, doing it in the same apiary like this, I recommend that you Make your split late on in the day and then close the bees in overnight. And then when the morning comes back around, open the entrance up and stuff a little bit of grass in there and make it difficult for the bees to get in and get out. They'll clear that grass up really, really quickly, but it does confuse them and helps them reorientate to their box. You occasionally need to do a bit of lifting and swap this box for that one to bleed bees and move them around a little bit, but it's worked really, really nicely here. I've taken 6 frames and I've split it out into 3 2-frame nucs, and my queen is in this one right here. So you can see here, not that many bees in here at all. I've got 4 frames of foundation, and then we've got the feeder. And I love this Langstroth feeder 'cause it comes right out like that. But you can see the difference between the color of the frames. I've got my 4 frames of foundation over here, and these are my 2 original frames. And I'll just show you what's on the frames. There's not even that much going on. And bear in mind, this is the one that's got the queen in it as well, so this is probably the busiest of all of them. But look at that frame there, hardly any bees on that side. And then that side of that frame, maybe 10 or 20% open nectar, and then just a lot of empty space and a few eggs being laid in there as well. So you can see it's a 2-frame split, but that is not even a frame of bees on that one there. And then if I pull out the next frame, We've got a little bit more going on, but not that much. Obviously, we've got a huge amount more brood on this frame. We've got brood in all stages. We've got eggs, we've got larvae, we've got nice young nurse bees coming out. But there's also quite a bit of dead space again, and not that much in the way of stores. It's gone a little bit cold all of a sudden here in the UK. There's a real wind going on, and I think it is impacting the flow. So although I've got just about the right amount of bees here, probably erring on the low side, but this one will be fine. I've got a queen. I've got brood. Probably haven't got quite enough stores, so I'm going to set this colony here up and give them a feed. It is so important to not feed them. Ow! That's a bee stinging my face. Ow! Is it there? Yeah, I can see it. Uh, I shouldn't get it out. Here we go. There you go. Cool. So I made a promise ages ago on this channel, every time I got stung, especially on the face, that I would show it. I think it's important to show it as well and talk about bee stings, 'cause we do sell really nice, calm, gentle bees. But if you inspect them without a veil, you kind of, you're gonna take the odd sting to the face like that. So my recommendation for you is to wear a veil at all times. So I'm gonna set this colony up. I'm gonna get the feeder on, but I wanna show you this queen first. A beautiful overwintered F1 Buckfast queen from Black Mountain Honey. That there is the key to getting this colony going. And we now have all of the resources that we need. So I'm gonna put that second frame back in there. And then what's nice to see is that the bees have actually moved onto the third frame. So although that first frame didn't have a full cohort of bees, a lot of them have started to draw out the foundation over here. And this for me is the biggest sign. This is what's most important in this video. Even with this amount of bees in a big 6-frame Langstroth box, they are expanding. They're saying we've got enough bees here, we've got enough resource, we've got enough brood, we've got everything that we need. Okay, I think they're a little bit light on stores, so I'm going to feed them. But if the weather was playing ball, they'd have enough incoming nectar as well. But the fact that they are drawing out comb shows that they have a surplus available, shows that the nectar is coming in. And knowing what I know, this little tiny 2-frame split here will be a big, strong, probably 12-frame colony come the end of the year. Not only will they completely fill out this box here, I'll put an extension box on top, another 6 frames, and have a 6-over-6 configuration. And this colony will easily go into winter on 12 frames of bees, possibly more than that. And the reason that these colonies here are able to grow to such a huge size from such small humble beginnings is that they are started at the right time of the year. They've been given the maximum length of the season in order to grow and expand, but they've been able to do that really difficult early bit at a point when there's no pressure. There's no robbing bees, there's no wasps, there's copious nectar coming in, and that just gives them a head start on the season. Now I said at the beginning I'd give you some advice on what to do later on in the year. My advice for the spring is do it early. First, second week of April, take a frame of brood, a frame of stores, put it into a nuc like this, take it off to another apiary, wait 8 days, knock down all of the queen cells, add in a mated queen, and then just go ahead and feed them up. That's what you should be doing early in the spring, and that's how you make super easy splits like this. If you want to flip that round and do it in the summer, do it post-June gap. You're talking about taking at least 3 frames of brood and then 1 or 2 frames of stores. You need double the amount of bees because they need to be able to protect themselves from the other robbing bees and the wasps. It becomes incredibly inefficient with your resources. It's a much better investment to make those splits early on in the season. So hopefully you found that advice useful. We've got tons of guidance and information like that on our online course, 14-Day Beekeeper, that will turn you from a beginner To an experienced beekeeper in just 2 weeks.