Overwintering a queen

[gwizzie]

Hi guys,

How many bees would it take to over winter a queen (mated) frames of nursery bees stores ect ?
Also when would this be too late to do ?

Thanks in advanced
G

[The Drone Ranger]

Hi guys,

How many bees would it take to over winter a queen (mated) frames of nursery bees stores ect ?
Also when would this be too late to do ?

Thanks in advanced
G

Hi Graham you can overwinter a queen in a Keiler mini nuc
A better chance might be if it was a double keiler mininuc
The double mininuc being small and cosy for fewer bees costs £13 + about £10 for the upper box ie upwards of £23

A better chance of making it would be a queen with at least 3 frames of donated brood and some foundation in a Paynes polynuc next month
Probably needing help to draw wax with light syrup £31.50 +delivery about £39

The most insulation might be the Thornes Everynuc which is much thicker poly and holds 5 frames
That's about £48 plus delivery so around £55 I guess (I think it has a built in feeder )
Again you would need about 3 good frames of brood plus the queen to get it going well and drawing foundation

If you raised a new queen now starting from scratch and grafting some larva into a cell bar it will take another 13 days approx for the queen to emerge ,about 7 more days before she is mated, then possibly anything up to 10 days to start laying so a month or nearly that

This gets us to the end of August approx and in September we are usually feeding bees to overwinter, at which time they are not keen to draw wax on foundation

So I would say either the single keiler well fed and fingers crossed

Or the Thornes everynuc but starting with 3 frames of brood next month for safety (relative)

But lots of people on here overwinter queens far more than I do
I only had one double keiler last winter with a spare queen

[gavin]

Yep, DR is on the right lines. Two frames in a Paynes nuc now, three next month, and the nuc has a fighting chance. However only if it is well stocked with bees of all ages, fed continuously and sited with decent forage in the autumn. Be careful not to lose the flying bees back to the parental hive.

If we have a dire August and September all bets are off.

[Bridget]

Yep, DR is on the right lines. Two frames in a Paynes nuc now, three next month, and the nuc has a fighting chance. However only if it is well stocked with bees of all ages, fed continuously and sited with decent forage in the autumn.

There is a certain minimum of bees to add to an apidea which is well annotated but I don't know what amount to add to a new nucleus. I made one up last year, guessing the amount but I think there were not quite enough bees as although they survived just they then got very stressed at the beginning of spring and died off.


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[drumgerry]

I think the point Gavin is making Bridget which holds true is the later you make the nuc up the more resources in bees etc you have to give it if it's going to have a chance of getting through the winter. Perhaps one way to go about it is to give it as many frames of bees/brood/food as you can spare without denuding your main colonies overmuch. Having said that some of us (well....err...me!) occasionally take a punt on a nuc and if we have a spare queen kicking about make up a nuc with less than the optimum and hope for a mild winter! It works some years and other years it doesn't.

[fatshark]

There's also a tipping point in the season - perhaps early August - when I'm looking at bulging nucs and wondering whether they need to be moved up to a full hive, or left in the poly box to overwinter. It's brinksmanship and heavily weather-dependent … a hot summer and long, warm autumn and they'll run out of space and possibly swarm. However, if the summer fizzles out and the autumn is cool and wet they'd never have expanded properly in a full hive. I usually err on the side of laziness (i.e. leave them in the nuc box) and justify it to myself by thinking that a strong nuc overwinters better than a colony with space in a full hive. Note that my nucs are generally poly and my hives cedar.

And back to the OP … I'd be surprised if a single Kieler would do in Ross-shire overwinter. Here in the Midlands I've had most success in a double Kieler, but even then have had at least one freeze solid on a particularly cold night. I ended up using the greenhouse to protect them - quite successfully. I think Pete Little overwinters his custom-made mini-nucs within a super stacked on top of a full colony, thereby benefitting from the heat rising up from the colony. There's a thread on this on the BKF, though the pics might have disappeared in a server meltdown.

[Calluna4u]

This gets us to the end of August approx and in September we are usually feeding bees to overwinter, at which time they are not keen to draw wax on foundation

Lol.....just along the road and the precise opposite of what we find both here and in Aberdeenshire. September and even early October are our key comb replacement months. They draw wonderful combs on the syrup feeding during preparations for winter, not a drone cell. You have about 3 weeks more of a window to get it done in poly hives. Bear in mind we are interleaving these into the nest, not placing them at the edges. We like a single generation of clean late brood raised in them.

We probably get 5 to 7 thousand sheets drawn at that time.

[The Drone Ranger]

Fair enough Calluna4u I'm sure you are right

How many bees would you say gwizzie needs to overwinter his queen ?

[Calluna4u]

Fair enough Calluna4u I'm sure you are right

How many bees would you say gwizzie needs to overwinter his queen ?

Depends very much what gear is available. Much along the lines of your first response.

We never overwinter mini nucs (Apideas etc and boxes of similar size), we don't even try as failure rate is too big to make it a productive exercise. However for using Paynes boxes there is still plenty time and we are still making some up this week with one full bar of brood, one of stores, enough bees to cover the two, and the rest foundation. As Gavin touched on feeding is then the main consideration. We do not feed constantly as they can put away too much syrup and hamper the brood raising. For a nuc of that size a litre a week is enough to make sure they do not starve and the queen keeps laying.

By the end of August you can still make them up but need a good bit more brood.

A rule of thumb is that one bar of brood equals three of bees once hatched is not far off, maybe a tad optimistic, but if you get these nucs up to 4 bars of bees by late August, with a good queen in them, they should overwinter OK.

Last autumn we tackled the failures in the nucs ( drone layers or queenless) by stealing two bars of brood from other nucs, and caging the queen between those, and it worked a treat, all but one of those got through, and that was mainly done on 23rd September, but a handful were about the 8th October. Still worked. So there is more flexibility in this than many would think.

There are guys in Canada overwintering several thousand poly nucs in a similar way. The trickle feed seems, to them, to be the crucial thing. You need to keep her laying if possible. As for our very late ones? Well we never checked after introduction, indeed the introduction cages were still there in April. No time for them to raise much brood before winter.

We will try to overwinter a handful of Keillers this winter to see what happens, using guidance from a friend in Europe who brings them through in a cold environment.

[The Drone Ranger]

Thanks for that Calluna4u
I will put that good advice into practice regards the polynucs and the feeding

I have tried apideas through Winter but they failed and worse still rodents ate holes in them

I only took one double keiler through last Winter for the sake of having a spare queen
It was up about 5 feet off the ground on a shelf south facing and made it in good shape