Queens, nucs, what to do.

[alfred]

So as some of you have seen from my latest posts I am starting to play with queens, nucs, and splits. I have taken a hive which was made queenless and split it up into several mediums each with some queen cells. I am real excited about the project and so far I have learned so much just by doing this. My excitement has gotten me going and I am starting to get a little crazy....

So at this point If all goes well I will end up with 5 new hives. which is great. But I have read how wonderful Nucs are and I can see that if I made some Nuc boxes that I could split these up even more, potentially as many as I have queencells and supplies for. so lets say that I did this and I have all these nucs, then what?

From what I see they don't winter well and I just can't see them growing into full sized hives in time to winter. So what do folks do with the things?

My same question goes for the queens. I have a kind of an idea that I could have extra queens as back-ups. Sounds good.... But how do I keep them. I get that there are several things that I could do. I could keep them in separate Nucs but then we are back to the earleir problem of wintering the Nucs. I could create some sort of queen bank that if I understand correctly is essentially one hive with several queens kept separate. This doesn't sound very sustainable.

So I guess that my question is sort of what is the point if you can't sustain through the year until next. Lets assume that I sucessfully made up a bunch of Nucs or banked a bunch of queens do they just die come winter if I haven't needed them to replace a queen or biuld up a weak hive?

[caticind]

I don't have any experience with queen banking. 

But as far as nucs go, I don't think you'll have much luck overwintering them where you are.  You can start a nuc with as little as a frame of brood and a frame of honey, if all you want is to rear more queens.  But a nuc that small won't build up in time. 

I'd think you would either make splits of a size that could plausibly build up for winter....OR be prepared to recombine your splits late in the fall (losing the extra queens in the process).  Others with more experience might have more unusual suggestions.

[RayMarler]

Michael Palmer over winters nucs in VT so you maybe able to do the same where you are.

http://www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?249694-Over-wintered-Queens

http://www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?189642-Wintering-Nucs

http://www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?232871-Overwintering-Nucs