Hi All On the topic of gaining rapid increase through splits there have been a lot of really good posts and cautionary advice. Speaking as a beekeeper who is at that stage where attempting to increase rapidly is a possible choice, and I have a lot less to lose here in the warm south (if my bees die, swarms will move into the bodies for free next spring at no extra cost) but have some other perspectives. There are two places where this approach will come seriously short. No wax and no drones for mating queens. In a beehive, in my opinion, the most difficult and expensive thing to get as a starter is drawn comb - at present I have ten hives that I feed extensively for the single purpose of comb production. Once one has comb, increase is simple if one has good queens. Now to draw wax, bees have an exponential ability to make the stuff the more bees there are (I think it's to do with heat generation and some other things). Little nucs make bad comb manufacturers. A two body hive with 15-17 frames brood will draw a frame in a day if it is being fed. The same hives queen can easily fill such a frame in a day and a half. A nuc will take a week or more to draw a frame - thats a weeks eggs lost because no laying space. So my strategy for increase is to have a number of good hives producing brood frames and then to do full hive body split and add a reared queen. A full hive body split will be able to move into two bodies far faster than a nuc into a single even. (It helps of course if you have a large supply of dirty honey to feed your bees from bee removals as is my case - note this is not such a good idea if diseases are prevalent in your area) Secondly, if you are rearing queens in an area with only weak nucs lying around, your queens will have access to few drones. Before one begins queen rearing, one needs to give a few good hives about a month and a bits good feeding to get them rearing drones. If you can lift out the end frame on each side of the hive and it is covered with a layer 2cm deep of drones, you will have a better chance of producing good queens. (In my area there are so many feral clonies drone availability is no problem, but I want to skew the natural population with 'desireable traits') Drones take ages to rear. Keep well Garth Garth Cambray Camdini Apiaries Grahamstown Apis mellifera capensis Eastern Cape Prov. South Africa Time = Honey If parents taught kids about the birds and bees, guys would believe they were half the women they used to be!! Standard Disclaimer applies to this post.