The books / Swarming and Increase / chapter 11 of 15
The nucleus split
All chapters
- Reproduction, not disaster
- The four triggers
- Swarm cells and supersedure cells
- Egg to capped in eight or nine days
- Why seven days
- Reading the signs
- Give them room first
- Cutting cells is not a plan
- Pagden's artificial swarm
- The Demaree method
- The nucleus split
- The bait hive
- After the swarm
- Growing an apiary for nothing
- Laying room is not storage
A nucleus split is the simplest swarm control in this book, and the only one that leaves you owning more bees than you started with.
Pull a few frames of brood and their attending bees out of a crowded colony, along with either a ripe queen cell or a mated queen, and move them into a small box of their own, a nucleus, or nuc.
The parent colony loses enough population and brood to relieve its congestion, often enough to cancel a swarm already in motion. The nuc, meanwhile, is a genuine new colony, small but complete, that will grow into a full hive over the following weeks if the weather and forage cooperate.