# General beekeeping > Queen raising >  Last of the Apideas

## Jon

I have two apideas with virgin queens recently emerged. one is a scrub queen made from a cell after i removed the mated queen from the apidea and the other I plucked off a comb last week from a nuc which balled its queen and made queen cells.
In this weather the chance of a successful mating flight is near zero.
I have another couple with queens which emerged a month ago which are bound to start laying drone quite soon.
The temperature today got up to about 12c at best.

I have about 15-18 apideas with mated queens and I hope to overwinter these.
If we have a winter like the one before last I will lose the lot but I would hope to get a few through to Spring in a mild winter.

Anyone else having a go overwintering queens in mating nucs?

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## fatshark

I have a few going into the winter.  I think the last queens got out to mate last weekend - I should know in a few days.  They were in well populated Kielers from which two other queens have already been mated this year.  Any that don't look OK in 7-10 days will be subjected to regicide and the box united over newspaper with another Kieler (as an aside, this is a bit of a pain with these mini nucs as the effective depth of the upper box is shallower than the main body  :Frown: ).  Others have well established queens and are already two storeys high and packed with brood and stores.  I'm not treating them with Apiguard this year as mite drops from my other hives are negligible.  I will probably use OA in mid-winter.

This year I've built some frame feeders for fondant.  It was a pain last winter splitting the boxes to replace the feeder in the main body of the mini-nuc - too disruptive to the small colony.  These feeders can be replaced by simply turning up a small bit of the cover polythene.  I've also used fondant in the top level of a triple storey Kieler but a) am concerned about the dead cold space above the colony, b) can't afford enough third layers and c) lost a couple last year with fondant leaking through the brood nest.  The frame feeders hold about a half kilo of fondant and have simple QE sides.  The bees clean them out, vacate them and then are unfussed when I sneak a replacement in  :Smile: 

These Kielers will be kept in the garden, tucked away in a sheltered spot.  I have a couple with what I consider more precious queens in and have considered moving the mini-nucs into the unheated greenhouse with a simple pipe entrance.  I know beekeepers in the USA overwinter nucs in their basements (in the cold states).  This wouldn't be too different though I'd worry they might fry if we had a very sunny winter day though realistically the temperature shouldn't rise much above the external temperature.  It would however shelter them from the worst excesses of the temperature here - two winters ago we had lows of about -12oC (I know this is nothing to Gavin and friends in the Highlands) and the agaves all survived in the greenhouse with a single low wattage heater to prevent night frosts.

In the meantime the ivy is starting and there's still some HB about so with some good weather (and it has been good recently) they should all be strong going into the winter.

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## Jon

Hi FS
I have put up slot shelving on the outside of the back end of my shed and have apideas and nucs lined up on 4 levels.
We get prevailing wind from the West and this is on the sheltered East side.
I have more at the allotment still to move home and a couple still at the association site.
Last winter I used single or double apideas with an apidea super on top with about 2k fondant in a plastic bag inside the super.
They hardly touched the fondant and i think the trick is to feed well in October so that the 5 or 10 frames in the apidea are capped with stores. A frame holds about 3/4lb I reckon.
We had a week of temperatures down to -12 two years ago.
If this happens again I will number each apidea and its space and move them somewhere where the temperature is nearer to zero until the cold spell passes.
I reckon it is a good idea to feed thymolated syrup as a nosema treatment as mini nucs are stressful to bees and the nosema levels could build up.
One problem I have at the moment is weak apideas with a mated queen but bees over just 1 or 2 of the 3 frames. They really need to be on 7 or 8 frames going into winter.
I might have to add more bees by taking young bees from a strong colony.

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## nemphlar

I'd hoped to take 4 mini nucs into the winter as possible replacements for spring failures, they were laying and looking OK. Only 1 of them survived the onslaught mainly from wasps

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## Jon

The wasps are a bugger most years but less of a problem in this season.
Funnily, at the association apiary one of our BKA members lost a couple of nucs to wasps last week right beside where the apideas are stationed.
They have destroyed a few apideas but it seems odd that they would take on a 3-4 frame nuc when the apidea is an easier target.
I reckon the worst is now over with regard to wasps, touch wood.

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## nemphlar

I think they're past it here as well, just the odd sluggish loner. Unfortunately damage is done. Need to get the router out for next year and make up a more complex maze type entrances for them

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## gavin

I also have two with queens laying.  Need to have a final check around all of mine and the association nucs to make sure they're not needed, than maybe I'll do as Jon suggests and boost them a little to help them through the winter.

There were still wasps on the prowl late last week.  Haven't been back since.

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## Jon

If we are anti import we need to have queens available in April to meet the demand and overwintering successfully is really the only option we have.
Dan B suggested sending genetic material to a warmer clime then importing back the queens but I think a local solution has got to be better.

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## gavin

Yeah, me too.

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## prakel

> If we are anti import we need to have queens available in April to meet the demand and overwintering successfully is really the only option we have.


Totally agree with the need to overwinter queens to meet the early demand but there are a couple of aspects which I do question.

Firstly, I'm not totally anti import although I may possibly come across that way on occassions. I think that selective imports of good quality breeders is not necessarily a bad thing. The main issue is not simply a case of who's hands they end up in but as importantly, how their selected daughters are distributed. With the greatest of respect no quality imported queen is going to be much use to a person that makes no effort to raise his/her own queens. Likewise there is never going to be a benefit to the community at large if repeated imports of hybrids OR different raises are made in an indiscrimate manner over a period of years by individuals who simply want to 'collect' different types of bee for their own amusement. Local breeding programmes need a central stability, that, I'm sure we'd all agree on.

Second, I'm not actually that sure that there's a genuine need for April queens (unless they're heading wintered nuclei) I tend to believe that a lot of the rush for these very early queens is the result of the availability of imports rather than the cause of imports.

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## Jon

> Second, I'm not actually that sure that there's a genuine need for April queens


I used one to replace a drone layer at the end of March but an alternative would be to combine with another colony.

Totally agree with the need to organise breeding programmes.
If I were to sell AMM queens to beginners in Devon it would wreck the open mating of the people who concentrate on Buckfast.
I suspect the main demand for early queens is from companies like Easy bee who bring in Carnica queens from Slovenia to make up nucs asap for new beekeepers who are not even aware of the issues surrounding bee breeding and imports.
Some of these were being ordered by beginners in varroa free zones in Scotland - completely unaware of the implications of that.
In general, the established beekeepers are selling nucs rather than buying them.

The thing is, all the commercial guys use the lack of early local queens to justify imports so for that reason alone it would be good to have queens available to render that argument redundant.

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## prakel

Yes, I don't think that we're actually disagreeing on anything here!

My comment re the need for early queens wasn't really aimed at the requeening of drone layer colonies as I think that that is a different issue all together and in my oppinion the suitability of travelled queens for such an operation so early in the UK season is very questionable. So yes, local grown queens do have a place in these circumstances.

I personally always try to winter queens as I've discussed elsewhere on this forum, normally in the mini-plus hives. But the main thinking is to use them to make up increase nucs at a time when there are plenty of drones in the pipeline; this way I can remove a queen and put the mating nuc straight back into use. With the the exception of trying to save a colony with a drone layer I can't see any value to myself in removing the wintered queen before I can hope to get another one mated from the mini-plus; this way they become long term colonies rather than a temporary queen take-away.

Again, the commercial guys who are pushing the 'lack of local queens' arguement are as I suggest earlier, creating demand where there probably wouldn't be one otherwise. I understand the rush to get some bees when people are starting out (or lost all their colonies through the winter...) but I very much doubt that there's any true benefit in a newly made April nuc (with imported queen) over a June nuc with a local reared and proven queen. Of course, a wintered nuc with a local queen from the previous summer -the way nucs should be produced in my oppinion- will run rings around the lot of them.

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## Jon

> Of course, a wintered nuc with a local queen from the previous summer -the way nucs should be produced in my opinion- will run rings around the lot of them.


I have about 20 nucs with 2012 grafted queens of those as well as the queens in the apideas.
I just ran out of bees for making up more nucs.

At a comittee meeting in my BKA a fortnight ago we discussed the supply of nucs to beginners and hope to formalise the process.

The very keen beekeepers could start with an overwintered nuc. in April.

Another batch of nucs would be ready in early July headed by the first of the grafted queens from that season.
We also proposed that the beginners keep their nucs in situ at the association apiary for a month before taking them home so they can get a bit of tuition and hands on experience under supervision.
Hope to get this set up for next season.




> My comment re the need for early queens wasn't really aimed at the requeening of drone layer colonies as I think that that is a different issue all together and in my oppinion the suitability of travelled queens for such an operation so early in the UK season is very questionable.


I agree with that as well. If you read beekeeping forum, many of the posters seem to buy in expensive queens at the drop of a hat and often have a £40 queen killed on introduction. That may well be operator error but some queens are removed from apideas and sold within a few days of starting to lay and these will often be rejected.

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## fatshark

I tend to agree with prakel that these overwintered queens should be removed and immediately replaced with a ripe QC.  This requires careful timing - there must be sufficient drones for mating and the mini-nuc cannot have expanded too much in the early Spring.  I failed to achieve anything like this in 2012.  No real surprise considering Spring didn't start until July :Smile: 

With no drones about I didn't want to waste the workers or brood in one spare mini-nuc so strapped the frames Heath Robinson-style into some National frames and expanded one up into a full nuc. without too much trouble (having failed to get them to migrate up into a nuc box once).

Next year I'm going to get some drone foundation into the hives early and hope I get the timing a little better.  With care it might be possible to get three tiers of brood and stores and split a single Kieler three ways for queen mating ... perhaps that might mean I could avoid filling the mini-nucs with nurse bees early in the season (which usually ends up having to be done on cool, wet and windy Spring days ... with the inevitable temper tantrum from the donor hive).

I suspect drone layers will be pretty frequent in early Spring 2013 and hope any I overwinter can be used as a quick fix for these hives rather than uniting and then splitting again post queen rearing.  Spares will no doubt be welcomed by association members.

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## prakel

> If you read beekeeping forum, many of the posters seem to buy in expensive queens at the drop of a hat and often have a £40 queen killed on introduction.


Topic drift, but; £40= (approximately) 
1Xapidea (possibly even 2XKeiler), 
1Xbatch of cell cups, 
1pack of cup holders (although more and more I'm not bothering, just wax the cups onto a piece of wood which is then waxed to the cell bar),
1pack of hair rollers.
+ the opportunity to raise a spare queen to replace the first one which we managed to lose trying to save a worthless/stressed/angry/old colony.

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## fatshark

prakel, you forgot the value of the satisfaction obtained from raising your own queens = £priceless  :Smile:

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## Jon

One problem I see with keeping mini nucs going non stop is lack of opportunity to give them a proper clean with acetic acid fumes and Virkon.
I suppose it would not be rocket science to operate a rotation system but I like to get most of the stuff in a sealed box in march or April and fumigate with acetic acid for a week to get rid of nosema spores and other lurgies.
Apideas being far too small are not a natural environment for a honey bee colony and I always imagine that any stress factor could send the nosema levels soaring.

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## prakel

> prakel, you forgot the value of the satisfaction obtained from raising your own queens = £priceless


How did I manage to miss the most important one?! Definately the best part of beekeeping for me.

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## prakel

> One problem I see with keeping mini nucs going non stop is lack of opportunity to give them a proper clean with acetic acid fumes and Virkon.
> I suppose it would not be rocket science to operate a rotation system but I like to get most of the stuff in a sealed box in march or April and fumigate with acetic acid for a week to get rid of nosema spores and other lurgies.
> Apideas being far too small are not a natural environment for a honey bee colony and I always imagine that any stress factor could send the nosema levels soaring.


Good points with regard to the smaller boxes (of which I have no experience worth mentioning) but I've not found any noticable problems with the mini-plus boxes* which if I remember right I worked out to have roughly the same comb area as a 4 comb BS; but in a better configuration to my way of thinking. With the m-p boxes it's easy enough to rotate out older comb as well as switching boxes to keep on top of things. Infact another upside of not pulling the queens too soon is surely a reduction in the inevitable stress which swapping out queens has got to cause.

* edit: I should of course acknowledge here that I'm moving away from the mini-nuc ideal. 

I do plan on buying in some apideas or Keilers (still not decided on which) for next year to see how I get on with them although I don't think that I'll try to run them through winter simply because I'm going to be exceptionally busy during the dark months of '13/'14 and already know that I won't be able to give them the attention which they'd undoubtedly demand.

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## fatshark

... had unmated queens (or at least non-laying queens which gave every appearance of being virgins).  Since the weather has now changed from "poor" to "utter rubbish" they were sacrificed and the workers and stores united with known queenright mini-nucs.  Not particularly enjoyable in the pouring rain ... and regicide always makes me feel guilty. 

Time now to batten down the hatches and feed them up for the winter.  I discovered yesterday my the hive stand loaded with poly nucs in the garden is high enough to squeeze Keilers underneath, so providing a bit more shelter. I'll have to wait for a cold snap or move them away for a week or so as most are in a field a few hundred yards away.

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## Adam

I had some mini-nucs lost to robbing and also lost some to absconding  :Frown: . I have two remaining. Neither are strong enough to survive the winter but there are queens that I have removed from other hives and are spares which would do if someone needed one in a hurry. It's fast approaching too late for that.
I'm not sure if it's worth borrowing some bees from elsewhere to strengthen them.

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## fatshark

Has anyone tried overwintering queens banked?  By which i mean caged in a super, or at least inaccessible to the resident queen.  Laidlaw and Eckert describe it I think, and got laying queens out the following spring.  I'd be worried about the cluster abandoning the caged queens ...

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## Jon

I have read a bit about queen banking but never used it as a technique.
My gut feeling would be that 6 months or so in a cage would cause some damage. Mind you, I have head people argue that queens kept too long in apideas are damaged but I have not found that to be the case.
I sold a couple of queens yesterday so am still combining apideas.
I use a piece of mesh cut to the size of the inner cover.
This has a bee sized hole in it above the feed compartment which i plug with fondant.
The queenless apidea contents are transferred to an apidea super which goes on top of the queenright apidea above the mesh.
It usually takes about 2 days for the bees to chew through the fondant and by that time they have the smell of the queenright colony.
As a further precaution, the bees first mix in the feeder compartment where the queen cannot enter so there is no chance of in influx of new bees balling her.
Must take a couple of pics as this system works really well and it is a good way to use those scraps of mesh left over from floor making.

Pictures here

This is where I intend to overwinter Apideas, on shelving at the back of my shed.
I still have another 4 or 5 to move there from elsewhere.

apideas-for-overwintering.jpg

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## Jon

> I have about 15-18 apideas with mated queens and I hope to overwinter these.
> If we have a winter like the one before last I will lose the lot but I would hope to get a few through to Spring in a mild winter.





> One problem I have at the moment is weak apideas with a mated queen but bees over just 1 or 2 of the 3 frames. They really need to be on 7 or 8 frames going into winter.


This is not going so well. I sold a couple of queens and used a couple for requeening nucs with dodgy queens but I am down to 8 already.
Some have just dwindled and others had the queen disappear. 
I hope this is not a sign of poor overwintering ahead as I have noticed a lot of clusters in my main colonies are smaller than they ought to be for the time of year.
Queens shut down or reduced laying very early this year. Last year they were laying well into November.

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## gavin

Haven't peeked under a crownboard for a while but I may do at the weekend.  I did notice some bee bits on the floor of one which suggests that I should have got the mouse guards on the wide open entrances before now.  Didn't try to overwinter any Apideas.  Given the condition of many folks' bees higher than normal losses this winter seem quite likely unfortunately.

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## Adam

I have one swi-bine mini-nuc remaining - It had it's stores robbed by wasps over recent weeks and last weekend bees were covering little more than 1 frame although there was a tiny amount of sealed brood. The queen was one whose daughters had temper issues and I only put her there after removal from a large colony because the little hive was available at the time. They won't last much longer. The queen isn't worth an attempt at banking. (Never tried it btw).

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## fatshark

Checked my mini-nucs today as double figure temps for the first time in at least a fortnight and all (at least half-heartedly) flying. Did little more than peek under the crown board and replace the fondant frame feeder. All looked much as they started, with about a third weaker than I'd like. Probably irrelevant, but interesting nonetheless, the adjacent nucs (all 6-8 frames in poly) were not flying (and proportionally had used a lesser amount of stores, though probably had more in frames). We had a pretty hard frost on Monday night. I wonder if mini-nucs never properly cluster for some reason?

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## Jon

> I wonder if mini-nucs never properly cluster for some reason?


They _do_ cluster but the cluster can freeze solid very easily if it is too small and there is a hard frost.

This is one which froze last winter. It had around 75 bees in it. You can see it had stores and pollen.

frozen-bees-apidea.jpg

Mine were flying strongly today as well. It was around 11c.

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## Jon

Down to 7 now but I think these ones are strong enough to last for a while yet.
They were flying strongly yesterday and today.
I have been sorting out the winter stores by putting an apidea super above each apidea and filling it half full of fondant inside a plastic bag. The remaining space above the fondant gets filled with a rectangle of polystyrene covered in tape to remove any extra space and provide some more insulation.
I remove the feeders, so the bees are on 5 frames with the fondant sitting directly above the top bars.
Two which I looked into had a frame of sealed brood.
One of these is a 2012 queen which I removed from a nuc in September as it made a couple of supersedure cells.
Interesting that it is still laying normal worker brood 2 months later.

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## Adam

Jon,
I can probably say without too many dissenting voices that it's quite possible (or likely?) for a duff (maybe nosematic?) queen to be superceded. I wonder if the size of colony in a mini-nuc is so small that the bees would not consider supercedure - as they would not be able to feed an egg well-enough to get a viable queen. Coupled with the fact that it's the wrong time of year. 
I too wonder is she will be replaced next year - either if your apidea gets full to bursting or if she is put in a full-sized colony in the spring.

(One apidea that I overwintered ok last year got to be full-to-bursting this year. The queen was small and I just left her there in case of emergencies. The apidea was so full just couldn't see how all the bees would fit in it, but they did. All 3 frames were constantly solid with brood. (I did bleed some bees off on occasions). But they didn't produce a drone or queencell and arguably they would have tried to in a nuc or larger hive if so congested). 

You'll have to let us know if she survives and prospers.

Do we have a bet on how many apideas survive?

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## Jon

I have had a colony throw up a supersedure cell a couple of times and on each occasion I removed it. The queen was still laying well 18 months later and it was definitely the same queen as I mark and clip. It is always a hard call knowing whether to leave them or remove them. The best policy is to have spare queens.

The survival of apideas is a bit of a lottery. If we get really cold weather the clusters will likely freeze.
I would love to work out a system for overwintering queens in something smaller than a nuc.

I have a couple of strong colonies headed by queens which overwintered in apideas last year so it does not seem to do them any harm. One of them spent 9 months in its apidea before I made a nuc from it at the end of May. I think the apidea was a triple by the time I transferred the bees to a nuc. I took a frame of sealed and emerging brood from another colony and put it in a nuc with a frame of stores and a drawn comb. I shook all the bees and queen from the apidea into this. A week later I removed the frame which had the emerging brood, now full of eggs and larvae, and gave it another of emerging brood. I got it up to 5 frames of bees in about 3 weeks.

The brood frames from the apidea got transferred to other apideas so nothing got wasted.

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## fatshark

Very cold here tonight so shifted a pile of mini-nucs into the greenhouse. This has my agaves in and is kept at a couple of degrees above freezing. Forecast is for sub zero for the next few nights. A couple of the Kielers felt worryingly light so they might benefit from some TLC.

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## Jon

> Do we have a bet on how many apideas survive?


Only 5 left now.
Not looking too good as they need to survive until March if I am going to find a home for any of these queens in queenless or drone layer colonies.

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## Blackcavebees

> Only 5 left now.
> Not looking too good as they need to survive until March if I am going to find a home for any of these queens in queenless or drone layer colonies.


Jon, have you considered overwintering these on top of full colonies? Above crown board but below insulated roof. Not sure on physical size of your apideas but would two not fit in a deep eke adapted to national footprint with void filled with insulation or wood shavings etc?  Just a thought, as heat rises and it may give that extra wee boost of it gets really cold, as I think it will this winter.

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## Jon

Hi

These are apideas:

hatched queen cells.jpg apideas piled high.jpg bees fanning on front of apidea.jpg

They are effectively mini poly hives and are very well insulated.
They are designed for getting queens mated and not for overwintering so this is just a little experiment with spare queens I had at the end of the summer.
An apidea should hold about 500 bees and a queen.
Some of these ones were a bit short of bees so had no real chance.
Last winter I had 4 survive but it was exceptionally mild last year.

You can see last years in this thread.

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## Blackcavebees

Hi Jon

I know what apedias are like, but don't have one to stick a tape on for size. It was just a thought as freezing I think will be your biggest problem. I have a mini nuc myself that I feel hasn't enough bees in to last the winter, but it was a late queen and just got mated. Got as much feed into them as possible but not enough bees I think. Anyway, ever the optimist. Got them double insulated with copious amounts of kingspan inside and out. Just thought that you could put a couple of apedias above a national for extra warmth that just might make the difference.

Didn't see your last year's post- some good links, thanks

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## Easy beesy

> Hi Jon
> 
> I know what apedias are like, but don't have one to stick a tape on for size. It was just a thought as freezing I think will be your biggest problem. I have a mini nuc myself that I feel hasn't enough bees in to last the winter, but it was a late queen and just got mated. Got as much feed into them as possible but not enough bees I think. Anyway, ever the optimist. Got them double insulated with copious amounts of kingspan inside and out. Just thought that you could put a couple of apedias above a national for extra warmth that just might make the difference.
> 
> Didn't see your last year's post- some good links, thanks


BCBs

Can you explain how you got 'king span inside and out' (especially inside) of a mini nuc please?

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## Blackcavebees

My mini nucs aren't insulated but I don't plan to over winter in them. I make most of my own kit and have national nucs made with double skins, imagine a national footprint but insulated inside with 1" kingspan all round and inside finished with 1/8" ply, divided into two so each side takes 3 national frames plus frame feeder. Outside look like commercial to accommodate inside insulation. The one I was taking about is also wrapped in kingspan outside and above as there really wasn't enough bees and I wanted to give as good a chance as possible before it reached tipping point.

Next winter I plan to overwinter my small colonies from late mini nucs in purpose built 4 way boxes on top of strong colonies, heat rises.  Hope this explanation isn't too confusing!

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## Jon

BCB
The insulation is not critical if you have enough bees in the box, ie at least 3 seams in a nuc.
Apideas are vulnerable to freezing as they only contain a few hundred bees.
My national nucs are just folded correx election posters about 3mm thick with 50mm of insulation on top.

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## Jon

Opened an apidea today to remove a feeder and give it 2 frames of stores instead.
I think I still have 5.

apidea-21-12-2012.jpg

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## Jon

Lost another apidea so down to 4 of the originals plus one with a queen and a few bees I rescued from a nuc on the way out.

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## nellyp

Jon's apidea postings have encouraged me to give them a try, following some grafting last year I had a couple of spare Q's so in they went with said young workers. One was plagued by slugs and died out and the other still going strong.

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## Jon

Lost my last 3 apideas in the recent cold spell.
Queens present but the clusters froze.
Just not enough bees in them.

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## prakel

Shame, but it's been interesting to follow their 'progress'. I seem to remember that you had far better results last year and as general consensus seems to be that there'll be losses on the + side of average this year it's probably still worth while repeating the experiment next winter...

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## Jon

last year I think I had 3 or 4 survived to a date where I could use the queens.
I have nothing to lose as I just graft a final batch and leave them in the apideas.
I always end up needing the odd one in October anyway.

My bees have far smaller clusters than usual this year and this also applied to the apideas so there were not really enough bees in them.
It had been a hard year weather wise.

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## fatshark

Lost my first mini-nuc and a nuc this week.  Both through starvation.  Both had fondant within perhaps 10cm ... typical pathetic cluster with the queen at the centre.  In checking back through my notes I'd commented that neither were taking stores down well in September and against the nuc had written "bet this one doesn't make it".

Like Jon the mini-nucs are really a bonus and require few resources after a late grafting.  However it reinforces the importance of uniting small colonies late in the year, rather than trying to get the nuc through the winter.

An entirely unscientific observation ... of six colonies on a single site (50:50 nucs and mini-nucs) the ones surviving are all dark bees from a known Amm-like queen.

Roll on Spring ...

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## gavin

> An entirely unscientific observation ...


Can't you do a Kruskal-Wallis on that?!

This seems like a repeating theme.  Exotic bees need more intensive management to be at their best in our climate.   Presumably when beekeepers used to their lower-management bees have their bees' genetics moved by imports nearby and the subsequent mixing, they experience higher losses?

This could easily be another factor in the east-west differences in winter losses amongst the hobby community.

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## Jon

My losses this winter are confined to nucs.
Almost all nucs which were 3 frames or less in October are gone, as are the apideas.
My bees are all dark and it seems to me that the biggest factor in winter survival this year anyway is cluster size.
What has led to smaller clusters this winter is another matter. 
Take your pick from varroa, nosema apis, nosema Ceranae, the weather, the ivy flowering nearly a month late, or neonicotinoids vectored in by the Klingons.

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## mbc

Lol. CCD on the starboard bow

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