>Then there is the matter of what the bees in the nuc are doing during the
queen introduction time or cell emergence and mating time and how many bees
we wish to devote to that "dead time".  Some queen loss is also predictable
in splits so how many bees do we want committed to what will turn out to be
queenless colonies?

Allen, the above questions define the gist of the issue for me.

One could mate queens in minis,then cage and intro them into singles stocked
with frames of bees and sealed brood.  This would minimize "wasted" bee
labor during the dead time, but would entail considerably more beekeeper
labor, and introduction issues.  I don't have Juanse's luxury of cheap
labor.

For nucs for sale, I do similar to Juanse--make up my 5-frame nucs with only
4 frames.  Fourteen days later, generally 4 out of 5 are laying.  I then add
the frames of bees from the dinks to the QR ones, so that all then have 5
frames of bees.  You then have 3 weeks until the bees need to be transferred
to a larger box.  These method works very well for nucs for sale.

For splits for ourselves, we like to use single brood boxes, with a loose
drop-in divider board that goes to the bottom board.  We make up a 4-frame
nuc on one side, and a 5-framer on the other (brood next to the divider).
This leaves a bit of space, so that the frames can be easily slid for
insertion of the queen cell, and later inspection for laying.

At 14 days we inspect.  If we have two QR in the box, we pull one out and
sell or make up another hive.  If only one is QR, we simply pull the divider
and add a frame to make up 10 (we always run 10 frames in our brood boxes).
This is the quickest, most labor effective method that I've found for making
increase.

Randy Oliver

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