Thanks trev, new sub from Australia here. I just made 20 nucs with caged mated queens. Can you be more clear about how long you wait between making the split, and when you insert the caged queen into it, and how many frames you use for the split of brood. I'm using 5fr deep nuc boxes, and I waited 12-24 hours before adding her in to them, I used a different cage with a round candy plug and I removed half of it as I was anxious for her to get going. Now my main concern is that in that waiting period of up to 24 hrs many foragers buggered off back the the doner hive, leaving just a skeleton crew of nurse bees, probably just enough to survive and keep the brood warm at night and feed the queen. Would it have been better to just make the split and put her in in a hour or so or what? I can say I did put one cage in to one nuc after 2hrs, today 5 days later I inspected it by open lid only and shes out. A few of the stronger nucs bee wise I've switched positions with the less populated ones and that helped to add more bees, nucs from the same doner hive though so they would be more accepting. A lot of this is exp0irimenting. There were two angry hives I re queened and they will be interesting to see if they accepted the new queen. Cheers matey
Excellent. Interesting that you didn't remove the escort bees. On the course I did, they removed the escort bees by letting the bees out in a shed with one window and recapturing the queen back into the cage. Your method is much easier
