I had the opportunity this past weekend to visit a warmer part of Canada
and take a look at some neighbours' bees that were residing there and it
reminded me of some things about package bees that can cause people grief,
problems with wintering caused by late summer crowding and why I don't own
any plastic nucs -- yet, anyhow.

The first group of bees in question were two-pounders from Australia and
had been installed March 6th into five frame expanded polystyrene nucs of
the style that have caught on recently in Alberta.  These nucs are
reportedly made in Quebec and cost about $32 Canadian dollars ($21 US).
They have a fairly thick wall (1-1/4"?) which is covered inside and out
with a tougher plastic, much like a good picnic cooler.

Each nuc holds five standard American frames.  A hole that appears to be
about 1-1/4" in the front and about 1/2 to 2/3rds of the way up serves as
an entrance.  The top is a slab that is similarly made and has a slightly
raised centre portion which fits down into the bottom part which serves to
locate the lid precisely on each nuc.  There is no hold-down for the lid,
and I am uncertain of how good a seal it makes.  The two parts fit pretty
well, but things do get between the surfaces.  Maybe that is a good thing.
 Bricks or boards serve as weights to keep the lids on.

The inner cavity is pretty well rectangular to fit the frames, which sit
on a ledge with a space underneath the frames of about 1/2" (I'm guessing
here).  Above the frames, there is a bee space of maybe 3/8".  The outer
surface is slightly rounded at the corners.  They appear to be a tough and
attractive box for bees.   Mildew seems to grow on the outside after some
use, but I would imagine that they would last 20 years or more.

Feeding syrup is accomplished by shooting a measured amount of syrup into
the entrance.  Because the bottom is molded and leakproof, the syrup sits
there until the bees take it up into the frames.  Apparently they do this
quickly and as a result do quite nicely.

Protein patties are a different matter, and unless some other lid or a
sack is used, the patties cannot be very thick due to the small headspace.
 This makes the amount of patty that is practical to feed directly over
the cluster smaller than what is optimal to minimize trips to the yards.
The hives I saw had all eaten every bit of their previous patty, which is
a less than ideal state.  Patties must be replaced before they are
entirely eaten for best results.

One use of these polystyrene boxes is to make up small nucs in early
summer and to allow them to develop into colonies that can be transported
easily to warmer spots for wintering and early buildup before returning
home in the spring to make up producing colonies.

Having said all that, I am not convinced I personally like the nucs.  I
have been watching them for some time now.  Some master beekeepers have
set up highly successful systems using them, however any nuc requires very
disciplined management.  A nuc can fill with bees and honey quickly and
plug up prematurely, cutting off brood rearing at the critical time for
making winter bees.  This ruins the prospects for good wintering.   I
suspect that the secret to success is to super them in August -- three
such colonies side-by-side can share two excluders and two stacks of
supers, I understand.

I know that such 5-frame nucs I have personally seen have plugged in late
summer and consequently winter less than ideally.  Nonetheless, the
overwintered ones I saw last weekend looked better than the packages which
had been installed into the same type of nuc box a few weeks earlier, and
which got me started on this epistle.  Earlier I had heard reports of the
wintered hives being damp with thin honey in outside frames, but when I
saw them, they appeared fine.

I'm a big strong colony type of guy, and the only thing I like about nucs
is that they will very soon be big colonies and be able to care for
themselves. I also hate transferring frames of bees from box to box.
Therefore I prefer to make my nucs in standard supers and split whole
boxes from one another instead of playing with individual frames and
hunting queens.  But that's just my preference.

The main advantage of these nucs is that 8 can be put nicely on one
pallet.  Since everything is exact in dimension, screens with a 1"
headroom can be made to fit perfectly and the pallets stacked as high as
you like for transport.

1,000 such hives can be easily placed on a trailer and moved great
distances safely and efficiently -- even in daytime -- using a highway
tractor.  I suppose that some care must be exercised to make sure that the
nucs do not get too strong or get moved in really hot weather, since use
of screens can result in melt-downs if the bees mass on the screens and
block their own air intake.

Anyhow, back to the packages...

My friends had purchased a large number of packages from a reputable
supplier and they had arrived on time and in good shape.  They installed
them into the nucs on March 6th and the weather was perfect: cool enough
that there was very little drifting.  They fed Fumidil(r) treated syrup
and several days later a small pollen patty (with about 33% pollen and the
balance yeast and soy with lots of sugar syrup to bind the patty
together).

The bees appeared to take well, and with very few exceptions remained
queen-right and even in size.  However, after several weeks, some started
to dwindle.  When I arrived, they had been installed for three weeks and
were due to have a hatch.  This is the time that packages look most
miserable, since the old bees have run their course and are dying off or
looking decrepit, and the first young bees are not yet out.

It was a cool, breezy day and I was even wearing shoes, not sandals, and
in spite of my fleece-lined ski jacket, I was becoming chilled after a
while.  We looked at several hunded hives, and after a while a pattern was
quite evident.  We would see a run of good, even hives, then a few
scattered poor ones, often with several close together. On examination, we
would see that the poorer ones had recently been good and had several
frames with brood, as could be expected, but the bees were virtually all
gone. Those bees that remained clustered at the top of the frames, in some
cases leaving sealed brood uncovered.

Since fumigillan was used at installation, we ruled out nosema.  I suppose
that viruses are not entirely out of the question, but due to the pattern
and frequency of the poor hives, I strongly suspect old bees were shaken
into some of the packages and shipped to my friends.  They had specified
that they did not wish to receive bees from the first shaking, and had
been told that the hives had been used for a previous shipment to another
country, but the evidence strongly suggests that this was not the case --
at least for the group of hives that provided bees for this shipment.

The reasoning is simple: on the first shaking, some hives will have a
large population of mostly old bees.  This is because that particular hive
 peaked and plugged at some point, or the queen failed and is being
replaced -- or simply failed.  If there was not a recent flow to wear the
bees out, and brood rearing is cut back, and the hive is well provisioned,
they can last quite a while.  The first shake will get rid of them and at
the next round -- if it is within a reasonably short time -- only young
bees will be gathered since the poor hives will be too small to shake
while they are recovering.

Due to the way many (most) package producers shake bees, each package will
predominantly contain bees from only one or maybe two adjacent hives.
Unless the bees are shaken into a bulk box before packaging, they go
directly through a funnel into a cage as each hive is shaken.  The result
is that some packages will have mostly young bees, some will have mixed
populations, and some will have old bees.  Adjacent packages will often
share the same population characteristics, depending how they are gathered
and stapled onto the sticks.

In my experience, roughly 10% of hives in any yard at any given time will
have queen problems, so the pattern and frequency of my friends package
dwindling fits the scenario perfectly.

I have often noticed that a two pound package is a bit more than large
enough to make a good hive.  However because of the risk of dwindling like
we see here, and variability in package size -- even in one shipment --
that turns out to be the minimum size that is consistently viable in our
region.  I have thus thought I should mix the bees up by dumping the
packages into a bulk box and then ladling them out into hives.  Last year
I did something that caused me to think twice about that idea.

Last year I bought three pound packages with one queen each.  Most I
installed into separate singles on pallets (see
http://www.internode.net/HoneyBee/ and choose 'Pictures of our
Operation').  The last 50 or so I installed into normal standard supers
divided into two separate five-frame compartments with separate entrances.
 I gave the original queen that came with the package to one half, and a
queen from a queen shipment to the other.  The idea was that the smaller
space should keep warm and that 1-1/2 lbs. of bees should be enough.  I
would save on cost of bees.

What Happened:  I went back in a day or two and found that the bees from
the half with the foreign queen had migrated across the box to the
entrance to the other compartment and gone in.  The other queen was in
many cases left almost alone.   Many were chilled.

I had assumed that package bees -- like a swarm -- will accept any queen.
That may be true, but if they have a choice, they may express a preference
for the one they travelled with.  Having said that, I must also remark
that packages have been successfully shipped with only pheremone strips
and united with a new queen from a new country on installation --
apparently most successfully.  I must also remark, though, that where the
pheremone strips are not picked up from the yard and removed, the
beekeeper has been known to come back the next morning to find the bees
have gone out and clustered on the strips.

allen