>I'm curious about this Allen (I'm in Saskatchewan as I type).

What do the guys there say?  There are lots of smart beekeepers in 
Saskatchewan.

>With the
>strong flows and long days that you have up there, I'd think that you could
>build up a pretty good number of nucs, if you weren't going for honey
>production from them.

You can _make_ lots of nucs, but we have had frost every month of the year 
up here and 3" of snow on the August 1st long weekend the other year.  

Another year we had six inches of snow on Labour Day.  Some years 
we have a killer frost by the 20th of August and it is all over.  

We have strong winds in this region too and if it is cold when it blows, 
good-bye small nucs.

The winters are two months longer than in southern climes, like Vermont 
and the sun angle much lower and the early spring and winter days are 
shorter, too.

I've bought bees from North of Vermont and they were a full month ahead 
of ours here.  Many Northern Alberta beekeepers haul their bees down to 
the 49th in BC to winter and are able to winter smaller hives.  Up here, 
small hives just don't make it reliably.

Some use insulated nucs or and that can work, but active there is a lot of work
keeping them just the right size.

I recall on e of the Kemp brothers wrote an article about how he was able 
to divide colonies into 16 with intensive management an  using  the vertical 
system.  That must have been 20 years ago or more.  I don't know of anyone
else attempting that more than once.

If it was that easy, we would all be exporting  bees instead of importing 
them.   Saskatchewan was claiming they would do that a few years ago. 

Is it happening?   If not, there is your answer.  It is not from lack of articles on'
the topic.

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