Hi Murray

 > We fill the mini nucs on an opportunist basis from late April ( but
 > more normally first 10 days of May) as soon as the first grafts are
 > ready, and first time around a 70% success rate would be good, a lot
 > need refilling that early. One which takes first time will possibly
 > turn out 4 queens by early July,

As my system was more geared to queen raising than honey production, my 
mating nucs were stocked with folding frames that had come from full 
sized colonies. This takes effort and delay out of the equation, but at 
the cost of honey production.

The nucs require little in the way of support or maintenance, but were 
fed syrup to reduce the amount of flying of workers.

My earliest round of grafting would be about the third week in April, 
with quite a poor success rate. Mating in September and into October can 
be surprisingly good, when the bees have been selected for supersedure 
traits, but there is little chance of doing much assessment work on the 
last few batches, by which time the numbers of nucs involved has been 
reduced as the smaller mating hives have had their frames redistributed 
into five frame nucs and also back into full sized hives for wintering, 
again the use of folding frames makes this simple and not too time 
consuming.

It may seem a strange way of working, but it suited me.


Regards & Best 73s, Dave Cushman, G8MZY
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman or http://www.dave-cushman.net
Short FallBack M/c, Build 6.02/3.1 (stable)

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