Making up Nucs

[Greg Peck]

I have 6 hives and would like to make a few more but do not want to reduce the productivity of my current hives to much. Can I take one frame of brood and or stores from each hive and combine them all in 2 or 3 nucs? I will buy new queens for each nuc. I just want to make sure that the bees from different hives will "work" together.

Thanks

[pdmattox]

That should work fine, just give a few puffs of smoke to keep them happy.  The smoke will mask any alarm phermone so they won't fight.

[Brian D. Bray]

I have 6 hives and would like to make a few more but do not want to reduce the productivity of my current hives to much. Can I take one frame of brood and or stores from each hive and combine them all in 2 or 3 nucs? I will buy new queens for each nuc. I just want to make sure that the bees from different hives will "work" together.

Thanks

That's generally the way I do it.  I take one frame from 4 different hives and add a foundationless frame for them to work on in the center.  With frames from 2 hives you could end up with the bees fighting but the serendipity is the more hives to more confused the bees are so using 3 or more hives works better than using just 1 or 2 hives as sources.  Once the confusion is over they settle down and get to work.  The other good thing is you should get queen cells from more than 1 hive, unless you want to use a particular hive as the breeder.  In which case mark the frame from that hive and destroy any queen cells on the frames from the other hives.  It also gives you a mixed genetic pool of drones if you were to isolate the nucs in an outyard.

[Greg Peck]

Thanks guys I thought I heard of people doing that before but I also heard of people when combining hives using newspaper and such to keep them from killing each other.

Thanks

[Dr/B]

Every spring, I take several of my biggest hives, and pull them all down to nucs, for my spring increases. 
(i.e. 1 frame honey + 1 frame pollen + 1 frame open "small" brood + 1 frame closed brood + 1 frame bees)

It amazes me how you can mix different bees from other hives together.  I mix and match enough to empty the hives and make all into nucs.  They've always came out fine.  It would mix them up genetically as well I suppose, and keep diversity in the hives.  For real aggressive hives I'll spray them with sugar water when mixing, just to be on the safe side.  I've not had any problems doing it this way so far.

best

:mrgreen:

[tig]

i don't have problems mixing frames from different hives.  since there's no queen, they have nothing to fight over.  the newspaper combine is only for merging bees into a queenright colony....you have to protect the queen below by using a gradual introduction .