I was just looking over the thread I started last September where I had 15 apideas and had high hopes of overwintering a few.
The last ones succumbed in a cold spell at the end of January.
I also lost most of the nucs I was overwintering. Total disaster but I was in good company as most of the local beekeepers had very heavy losses. On an average winter I would expect to get a few apideas through to a point where I could find a use for an extra queen in the spring.
At the moment I have 10 Apideas going strong, 8 of them with 2013 grafted queens which would be worth using, and 2 with older queens which were taken from colonies which were requeened. Two of the apideas are triple units and the rest are on doubles. All have been well fed and are heavy. I looked in a couple last week and queens are still laying.
There were a few interesting suggestions in the thread from last year such as overwintering apideas or mini nucs on top of a full colony. Pete-L is the man who does this routinely I think.
Anyone else got a few queens left in mini nucs? (Those double white boxes MBC, that's cheating, too big!) If I had enough bees I would have all these queens in nucs but I didn't have enough spare bees.
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