>  I find myself increasingly moving in this direction, i.e. doing
>less requeening and instead taking the brood and bees from the hives I
>otherwise would have requeened and doing other things with them, like
>making up nucs, strengthening nucs, etc. Mike, I especially wonder what 
>you think.


Whoo Hooo!  That's exactly what I've been doing now, for some time. Allow 
your best colonies to remain as strong as possible, with ample supers 
during the flow, and sacrifice the duds for making nucs...which are 
wintered and used the following spring for replacements, increase, and 
requeening.

Actually, sacrifice is the wrong word. After taking all the brood, and 
enough of the bees to take care of it, the old queen can be added to what 
is left over...usually a body of empty combs and combs of honey. Much of 
the field force will be there, too. The colony will build back up, and can 
be requeened with the last round of your queens...say on the Goldenrod flow.



>   Of  course, you wouldn't want to break up your hives right before or in 
> the
>middle of a honey flow.


Why not? These colonies that you are breaking up aren't making much honey, 
anyway. And a honey flow is the best time to raise cells and get queens 
accepted. And if you make up these nucs early enough in the season...like 
on the flow...then they may be split again, yielding even more nucs from 
that original colony that you split up.

>And requeening, at the times of year when it works
>well, is perhaps less labor-intensive.

With nucs, it is just so easy to requeen, just about anytime.

>  What I'm talking about might also
>provide more opportunities for unwittingly spreading brood diseases.


Well, you are looking at the brood as you make up these nucs. I mean if 
there was Foul, wouldn't you know? And if there's Chalk...if you are 
raising hygienic bees, then it won't matter anyway.

>Nonetheless, my inclination is to favor the approach.  There seems to be an
>element of vigor that isn't altogether achieved by simply requeening.

It's true. Nucs are special. I wonder why that is. They resist Tracheal 
better than production colonies. They do better keeping the Varroa load 
down better than production colonies. And when you requeen a weak colony 
with one of these over wintered "heifers"...Kaboom!

>  And
>issues with queen acceptance seem to be all but eliminated.

Another thing I like about wintering nucs...you can see how the queen and 
her bees perform, before she is ever placed in a production hive. Culling a 
poor queen from a nuc and requeening it with another, or a cell, is quite 
easy. And, not much of your resources are tied up in the process...as in 
requeening production colonies.
Mike 


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