Beekeeping Made Easy 

                      Nuc -- small hive                          

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  A nuc is a small hive.  It traditionally contains three to five frames of bees, a queen, and brood.   A five frame nuc will develop much faster than a package of bees will but the cost is also higher.

•    Advantages of a Nucleus hive       

• Since the bees, queen, and frames already are started, there is no need to build all the frames and go thru the process of starting a new hive such as you would with a package of bees.
• All you as a beekeeper will need to do is transfer the frames from the nuc into a deep hive body set up on a bottom board and add the number  of frames  to complete the brood chamber.  Usually this would be five or six frames of new foundation.
• Normally, the nuc will have some honey and pollen in the frames but you will still need to feed the nuc for it to progress as you would like it to.
• Most important, a nuc will develop faster than a package of bees.   It will take a package of bees approximately 10 to 12 weeks to reach strength to gather a honey crop.  It will take a nucleus hive only six to eight weeks to reach that same strength.  The reason for this is:  A queen already is laying eggs in a nuc and has brood which will be emerging as adult bees.  The bee population is stable.   In a package, the queen will be delayed the time it takes the bees to release her from the queen cage before she lays her first egg.   It will take 21 days before this first egg emerges as an adult bee.  In the mean time, a number of bees that arrived in the package will die.  It is estimated that about 1/3 of the bees that arrived in the package will die within 30 days. This means that the population will decrease until enough new bees are born to replace the bees that died.  Until this state is reached, the hive will struggle to survive.  If for some reason the queen fails, the package is in great risk of failing as well.

• Disadvantages   (It will cost more than a package but you are getting more).

We can only think of one great disadvantage of a nuc.  That is the possibility -- repeat possibility -- that the comb on which the bees arrive is infected with American Foulbrood.  Even with an inspection certificate, AFB can be masked if the beekeeper is using TM-25 as a treatment.  Unless you continue the TM-25 treatment, the AFB could return.