Instead of using NUC's use a single deep and a super with an excluder. Keep your eye on them and pull a frame of brood if they start to get too populace. Any smaller than that and you can't get enough field bees to effectively pollinate. Use 5-8 frames of bees. If there are 8 frames, keep an eye and be on the alert for swarming behavior if they expand. New queens will help suppress the swarming. If the pollen source is good, the queen will begin laying like gangbusters and fillup the single deep. Keep your eye on them and pull a frame of brood if they start to get too populace. You can further reduce weight if you move the super separate. Just add it empty before the move and replace it with an empty one just before the removal. Remember, they don't have to be light all the time, just when you need to move them. You can pull deeps of honey and replace with empty just before the move. Make sure they get food once they are in place. Thom Bradley Thom's Honeybees Chesapeake, VA [log in to unmask] wrote: > > Anyone have experience using 5 frame nucs for pollination of home gardens/a > couple fruit trees? > I get many requests for bees and would not mid the lifting if I could keep > things down to 50 lbs or less.