At 10:29 AM 7/3/96 -0400, you wrote: >On Mon, 1 Jul 1996, Mark D. Egloff wrote: > >> Gentle beepeople: >> I have heard and read of overwintering 5 frame nucs and am >> over existing parent hives. But is there enough room for >> adequate honey stores in a 5 frame nuc? >> > We wintered 6 frame nucs this past winter. If the temp. is right, >honey stores are no problem. I think even 4 or 3 frames may be adequate >because they had so much honey left. > Bee-L'ers, We winter 6 frame (medium-depth) nucs as well. The temperature in the room is 46 F plus or minus 3 F. On average our nucs consume 6.2 lbs. of corn syrup during the wintering period. Feeding one gallon of corn syrup per nuc gives us sufficient winter stores for all of the nucs. You may want to consider indoor wintering your colonies on corn syrup or granulated sugar syrup instead of honey. I have heard that the amount of ash and other non-digestible substances is greater in honey than in corn or cane sugar syrup. Therefore, with honey (compared to corn syrup), the bees have to hold a greater volume of waste in their bodies during the time they are being wintered indoors. Other beekeepers that winter indoors have told us that they experience a greater amount of dysentery when indoor wintering their bees on honey instead of corn syrup. I've never seen any data to back these claims up but it all sounds logical to me. It might be something worth considering anyway. You'll need to feed at least one gallon of syrup anyway to get some Fumidil-B into the hive. Craig Abel Entomologist North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station (USDA-ARS) Iowa State University Ames, Iowa, 50014 U.S.A. [log in to unmask]