Top Bar Nuc Box - Golden Mean

A Nuc is a hive in miniature and can house a functioning colony of bees. Our Nuc is about half the size of our full hive. The Nuc can be a temporary home for the bees, whether you just caught a swarm or made a split from your hive. The intent of the temporary home in the nuc is to transfer the colony from the Nuc into a full hive, so that the colony has time to fully fill out a regular size hive.

We have been using these small little mini hives for many years and for many uses, but never realized how MUCH we use them, they just have become a part of our bee world. Well, this year we hosted Bee Doctor training workshops here in Eldorado, where we basically open up our world of “bee helping” to the participants.

The Bee Doctors got to see how we put these little hives to use and they all wanted to incorporate it into their practice! This is when we saw how important this mini hive is to what we do. We have, in use during the bee season, about 20 of these mini hives and use them all season long and... Well, we never really thought about how useful it is to have one of these around or that anyone else would want one. Most of the new Bee Doctors wanted to have one, so we got a bunch of them made and they are now available 

The beekeepers call their smaller version of this kind of a mini hive a Nuc, short for Nucleus, but a mini hive can be used for so much more. Traditionally a Nuc is used to create a small colony of bees, by taking brood and honey combs from a healthy hive and putting them into the Nuc. Then a bought or reared queen is put into the Nuc. Once this Nucleolus colony gets established, the beekeeper will sell the Nuc, which is then transferred into the awaiting hive. A traditional nuc has 5-8 frames so it is more than just a package of bees and a queen, there are also frames of brood, pollen and honey. This is a faster way then installing a “package” of bees to get a colony up and running