On Sun, 7 Apr 1996, Vince Coppola wrote:
 
> Anyone out there with experience wintering nucs?
 
Margriet Wyborn, a PhD in our lab, did some work on the mass storing
of queens in various setups for overwintering back in 1989-90.
She wrote an article with Mark Winston and Phil Laflamme in the March 1993
American Bee Journal summerizing their results (the article is titled
'Storing mated queens during the winter in managed honey bee colonies'.
She tested a number of set-ups, most notably; 1) single, free-running queens
wintered in 5-frame nucs placed side by side and back to back to form an
insulated condominium of 10-20 colonies, 2) colony queen banks with 24 or 48
queens banked in overwintering queenless colonies, and 3) same as 2 (but only 24 queens
banked) but banked queens transfered to mini-nucs (stacked above a
queenright support colony) in January.  They found that set-up 1 yielded
the least queen mortality (between 0-10%), followed by the mini-nuc
arrangement (@25%), and the queen banks (>30%).  Statistically set-up 1
was not significantly different than the mini-nuc set-up, but was
significantly better than banking.  The mini-nuc set-up, however, was
not significantly better than banking.  They conducted an economic
analysis of the different set-ups they tested and concluded that the
mini-nuc system, although as successful at overwintering queens as
5-frame nucs, was not economically feasable because it requires special
equipment and extra labour costs in January.  Taking into account the
level of queen survival, the number of queens banked, and labour costs,
they calculated that banking 48 caged queens in strong colonies was the
best arrangement and would give a beekeeper about $13,000 Canadian
profit for selling queens for every 100 colonies used as storage.
 
There is more in the article, and you should dig it up if your
interested. We have a mild climate here in Vancouver, but we commonly
bank our queens using the 48-queen bank set-up described in the article,
with good success.
 
Cheers,
Adony
 
****************************************
*** Adony Melathopoulos ****************
***** Center for Pest Management *******
******** Simon Fraser University *******
*********** Burnaby, British Coumbia ***
************** CANADA ******************
****************************************
 
'All bees are looking for bargains in nature's supermarket'
- Bernd Heinrich
 
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