Less than a third of the red oak still stands, pushing up from a gnarled and buttressed base. If two of me were to lie end to end, we might span its diameter. Most of the base is only a stump now, but the living part of the tree still stands tall above her surrounding progeny of red oaks. 

A friend who knows these things says this tree may be 400 years old! Four hundred years old?! If so, it would have sprouted around the same time Charles Charleville built Fort Lick, later to become Nashville, where he traded furs with the local tribes. This tree would have presided over a part of this state's prehistory and over its entire history as Tennessee!

Early on I was advised to cull this and other old trees on my land--to make use of the wood and so that surrounding trees would have room to thrive. Isn't that what we do with our elderly? Remove them to make way for new generations? Don't they just take up space and resources that others could make better use of?

Maybe not. What we learn in The Secret Life of Trees, a book by Colin Tudge, is that these grand old trees send out a massive underground root system that feeds and is fed by other trees in the forest. The other trees live in symbiosis with these old growth trees, exchanging nutrients unseen below the soil line even when the older trees are but stumps. Not only this, they continue to sequester carbon, give off oxygen, and to support the structure of the surrounding soils. These old trees are literally feeding the forest and keeping it healthy as they slowly age in place and fade away--full of purpose until the end.

I feel as if I am becoming an old tree sometimes. I absorb so much angst and poison from the air around me, buffering and sequestering, trying to turn it into breathable air and nutrients, trying to protect and feed others as my own limbs become more withered and gnarled. On good days, I realize and appreciate how deep my roots go, tunneling unseen through the world to nourish those who've come after me and for whom I care so deeply. That bond and watching them grow and prosper nourishes me in return. These old trees show me that even when parts of me begin to fall away and I am left a mere stump of myself, I will have purpose. With that I'll be a happy stump!

Making nucleus hives or “nucs” is a good way to expand your apiary. This involves removing and re-hiving 3 or 4 frames of bees, capped larvae, newly laid eggs, honey, and pollen from a healthy, established hive and letting the bees use this to make a new queen and to establish a new hive. This article is an update of my 2014 explanation of how to do this. 

Timing

The absolute best time to start a new hive is at the beginning of the spring nectar flow, which is just about now in Middle Tennessee.

​Healthy hives naturally cast off swarms in the Spring and will begin doing this soon. Making nucs allows the bees to meet their need to swarm, but allows you to choose their new home. Honeybees need an abundance of nectar to make the wax needed to establish their new hive. They can only make this much wax in the spring when the flowers are in bloom and the nectar is flowing. In my area, the nectar flow occurs traditionally from mid-April to mid-June. But in the past few years, the season has started by the end of March. I have already started making nucs this year.

In making a nuc, essentially you are creating a controlled swarm--but without the queen. So along with taking bees for the new hive, you must ensure that you take newly laid, unhatched eggs, less than 3-days old. These look like little grains of rice in the bottom of the cell. 

Once in the new hive, the bees will discover that they have no queen and will go to work making one. To do this, they will choose one or more of these unhatched eggs and create a queen cells around them. When these hatch, the bees will feed them only royal jelly and thus develop the new queens. Waiting for the nectar flow is important not only because the bees will have access to lots of nectar and pollen for food and wax building, but also because plenty of drones will be available this time of year for the newly hatched queens to mate with.

This timing is also important because bees from your bigger, more established hives will be busy gathering nectar and pollen from nature’s abundance and less likely to rob out the smaller nucs.

My nuc boxes are regular-size deep hives that I have sawn in half and rebuilt (see photos).

​ But you can put your frames in the middle of a regular deep hive body or if you use all medium hive bodies, in one of those. Just put the nuc frames in the center of the box and fill in with empty frames or drawn comb if you have it. 

The hive you take the nuc from must be healthy with lots of bees and a good laying queen. A healthy hive will have a good solid brood pattern (not spotty) and by this time should have lots of eggs, larvae, and capped brood. Drones should also be present by this time of year.

Feeding

For those who follow my blog, you know I don’t feed my bees anything but honey. Since I’ve been doing this for a number of years, I’ve learned to freeze frames of honey for making nucs or for emergency winter food. I also usually have jars of crystallized honey left from the prior year that I can use for feed. You may not have that luxury if you are just starting out. In this case, you may have to make some sugar syrup as starter feed. However, by waiting for the nectar flow to create your nucs, you should only have to feed them once. Feeding them more than that during the nectar flow can be counterproductive. You want them to learn to gather their own nutritious nectar and pollen, not to be dependent on you, poorly nourished, and making honey out of sugar water. I have had nucs do very well during the nectar flow with no feeding at all and this is an option for you too.

If you do make sugar syrup, mix one-half sugar and one-half water, boil to kill any pathogens, and then let it cool before feeding. Do not just pour the syrup into a container because the bees will drown in it. You can use a small jar. Choose one that will fit inside your top feeder box (see photo). Fill it, punch a few small holes in the lid and place it upside down over the hole in the inner cover, inside your feeder box. Test it first to make sure your holes aren’t too big and the syrup doesn’t pour out.

Patience

Now you wait--and hope! As long as you see bees coming and going, stay out of the boxes for a month! It will take 14 days for the queen to hatch and up to another week for her to mate. In the last week, she will have begun laying eggs. If you check too soon, you may accidentally destroy a queen cell or you may not see her because she may be hidden among the bees (an unmated queen is easy to miss) or is out on her mating flight. When you see new eggs and larvae, you’ll know things have worked out. If things didn’t work out, you still have another month of the nectar flow to try again. On average, this method works to establish a new hive 70% of the time.

Happy nuc making!

​Photo: notice the melted spot on the top of the hive? Means the bees are in there, alive and well, producing heat, and making that melted spot! Hope springs eternal! Rapping your knuckles on the side of the hive with an ear against the cold woodenware will produce a lively roar!)

How are your bees? Hate that question these days. This beekeeper is holding on by her fingernails, and while hopeful, also knows any season could be her last.

The bees are in trouble.

That said, I look forward to February here in Middle Tennessee--the beginning of a new year of bee management. February may well be the most important month in a beekeeper's year these days. Why? In February, the maple and elm trees begin to produce pollen. In February, the bees begin to collect this tree pollen because the queen resumes laying eggs for new bees and the new bee larvae need this protein to survive. In February, we usually have a spat of days in which the weather hovers around 70 degrees and beekeepers can look in on their bees. In February, bees are already preparing to swarm come spring, so beekeepers need to be thinking about how to control these swarms so that they get to keep their bees. Thus, the importance of February hive management.

I begin February preparations in January. These days I am busy cleaning up old frames, scraping and burning old wax, and rewiring frames to swap out for old ones. I need to have my equipment ready for the February hive inspection.

I am old school, and my hive configuration going into winter is 2 deep boxes, topped by one shallow of honey. (I know that the trend now is to run all mediums and that's cool. Principles will still apply.) Usually the bees have all moved up from the bottom deep hive into the top deep by late winter. If the bottom hive is empty during my February inspection, I reverse them--so that the bottom deep contains the cluster of bees and the top deep is empty. This gives the bees room to work and move up as the season progresses.

Word of caution: If the bees have not moved up into the second deep (or medium) but the cluster is situated between the two boxes--leave them be. Don't break up the cluster. Wait a bit.

Another critical part of February management is to break up the honey dome, if you have one. I leave a shallow of honey on top of the two deeps every fall. If this shallow is still full of honey at the end of winter, it will make the bees think that they are congested and need more room--they will prepare to swarm. So I will "checkerboard" this honey dome--pull out every other full frame of honey and insert an empty one. The bees think they have room to fill and work to do. The extra frames of honey can be frozen to feed back to new hives in the spring.

These hive manipulations will help your bees have more room to work and will keep them at home longer, BUT a healthy, strong hive is meant to swarm--it's how bees perpetuate themselves. It's a good thing and means you have healthy bees and hives if they want to swarm. BUT of course, we want to keep those bees at home and provide them the best chance of survival so, think ahead. 

When the spring flow of nectar begins be prepared to artificially "swarm" your hives so that you can keep your bees and even increase your apiary.

To come--creating nucleus hives when the spring nectar flow begins.