Why Are Others Advertising Earlier Nucs?
That’s hard for us to say, but certainly something you should question before ordering elsewhere. There are many nuc producers out there, producing them many different ways – some good and some bad in our opinion. Some of the ways we have heard of people producing earlier nucs include:
What we do know is how we produce our nucs, and we take great pains and pride in doing so! Although our nucs may not be the earliest, they are produced the same way we produce our own colonies. We don’t take shortcuts and would not sell something that we would not readily keep for our own apiary. That method includes:
Based on past experience, this usually means that our very first nucs (for the current year - not our overwintered nucs) are generally ready for our customers starting in early June (sometimes a bit earlier, but that should be considered a bonus) and we continue producing and releasing on a first-order, first-served rotational basis into early/mid-July when we stop and then begin producing our own nucs for our own over-wintering purposes.
Despite requests to do so, we will not shortcut our process even though it makes more work for us and we know that customers are anxious to get their bees early. Rearing queens and starting nucs, like beekeeping and all types of agriculture, is not an exact science. Even with all these extra measures and safeguards, statistically a fairly high number of honey bee colonies will fail in any given year. However, we want to do whatever we can to help protect your investment and provide you the best quality product possible in order to give you and your new bees the best shot at survival and success. (Although there are many many other things that you will need to do once you have them to continue striving toward success, and even if you do all those things, unfortunately, they may still fail… Some of these things such as heavy feeding, regular sugar roll tests and treatments for mites, and other measures are discussed elsewhere on our website and certainly through other publications and resources.)
- They produce them in the South and transport them early in the Spring. (Those are nucs, but not Northern nucs.)
- They buy package bees from the South, put them into a nuc box and feed them for several weeks, then sell them as nucs. (Again, not Northern nucs.)
- They produce them the previous year, then overwinter them in the South, then bring them back up North. (Maybe from northern stock, but obviously not locally over-wintered stock.)
- They produced them locally the previous year and overwintered them locally for sale in the early spring. (These are generally good, but typically hard to find and costly given the expense and losses that the producer had to sustain. Also, worth verifying the age of the queen to make sure she is actually last year’s queen and not an even older queen that the producer was culling from his own apiary. Note: We mark our queens per the international standard color for the year of production.)
What we do know is how we produce our nucs, and we take great pains and pride in doing so! Although our nucs may not be the earliest, they are produced the same way we produce our own colonies. We don’t take shortcuts and would not sell something that we would not readily keep for our own apiary. That method includes:
- Overwintering colonies from the year before and working to feed and build them up as early in the Spring as feasible.
- Observing and selecting queens from locally overwintered colonies that have desirable traits such as: good stores going into the winter, good spring build-up, good multi-year overwintering, industrious, good disposition, just to name a few. These will become our “breeder queens” from which to produce our new queens.
- We don’t even think about starting to produce new queens until we see sufficient drone rearing in progress to provide an abundance of properly-aged, sexually-mature drones to allow virgin queens access to plenty of diverse drones at the time they will be going on their mating flights. (While it is certainly possible to produce virgin queens earlier in the season, if they do not encounter enough diverse sexually-mature drones on their mating flights, they will end up poorly mated and will most-likely fail or be superseded prematurely.)
- We also try to watch and time our queen production for periods of time that will generally produce ideal temperatures and conditions for queens during their mating flights to permit the best opportunity to be well-mated.
- The queens we sell in our current year nucs (produced from our overwintered stock) are young queens from this year. Queens are most prolific egg layers the first year and then taper off each year thereafter. (In fact, other than our selected “breeder queens”, we usually kill and replace the bulk of our queens late each summer so that our own colonies have young queens to build up strong for winter and early the following spring.) Young queens will give your new colonies the best opportunity to build-up quickly. (What this means is that our queens in your nucs are produced from overwintered stock, but they themselves have not overwintered yet. This provides you with a young productive queen with the historical traits to be able to survive our winters.)
- Once we have introduced a young mated queen into a nuc, we observe her for a period of time to verify acceptance by the colony, good egg-laying patterns, good production of worker brood (not just a drone layer), that she appears healthy, etc., before releasing that nuc to our customers. Sometimes, we will reject a queen and replace her which then starts the observation period for that nuc over again and sets it back in being released.
Based on past experience, this usually means that our very first nucs (for the current year - not our overwintered nucs) are generally ready for our customers starting in early June (sometimes a bit earlier, but that should be considered a bonus) and we continue producing and releasing on a first-order, first-served rotational basis into early/mid-July when we stop and then begin producing our own nucs for our own over-wintering purposes.
Despite requests to do so, we will not shortcut our process even though it makes more work for us and we know that customers are anxious to get their bees early. Rearing queens and starting nucs, like beekeeping and all types of agriculture, is not an exact science. Even with all these extra measures and safeguards, statistically a fairly high number of honey bee colonies will fail in any given year. However, we want to do whatever we can to help protect your investment and provide you the best quality product possible in order to give you and your new bees the best shot at survival and success. (Although there are many many other things that you will need to do once you have them to continue striving toward success, and even if you do all those things, unfortunately, they may still fail… Some of these things such as heavy feeding, regular sugar roll tests and treatments for mites, and other measures are discussed elsewhere on our website and certainly through other publications and resources.)