My 3 year old hive swarmed on me early in the season. Took a couple frames of cells and made 2 medium strength splits. The parent hive and 1 split both got mated and took right off. My second split hatched and I saw the virgin, but she apparently never made it back to the Nuc from her mating flight. Took a frame of eggs from my other split and they made cells. Gave em about 2 weeks and looked in today for eggs. Looks like I have a laying working situation. Just some spotty drone brood and only drone brood. This is my first laying worker scenario, which is a good learning experience, but I'm kind of scratching my head on where to go from here. I figure my options are:
1. Add a frame of eggs and open brood every week for 3 weeks. Let the raise a new queen.
2. Shake all the bees and give them a frame of eggs, or maybe buy them a queen.
3. Perhaps to a newspaper combine with my other split to strengthen it for winter. It has grown to a single deep.
I'm thinking the latter would be a good option to stack the deck on my other split making it through winter.
I am very curious about trying to overwinter a Nuc though, and thought it might be worthwhile to try to build this one up to experiment. If they don't make it, not a huge loss to me. For those that overwinter nucs in my region, do you use wooden nucs or the styrofoam ones? I'm thinking the styrofoam would have better success.
What are your thoughts guys and girls???? :)