I keep several small starter boxes called nucs around. These 5 framed bee boxes are ideal for many chores in beekeeping and well worth making or buying. The photos on this page show one nuc that I built several years ago out of scrap plywood. It has held up fine and I have used it many time.

Here pictured is a swarm captured on my neighbors property. See more about the swarm in the swarm section, linked on the main beekeeping homepage. A Nuc can be used to house a swarm, start a new colony and queen, house frames during hive inspection and many other uses.

Another nice thing about a Nuc is that it makes finding an unmarked queen much easier. Usually, the queen will find her way toward the center frames and workers will store honey in the outer frames for insulation.

This can happen fairly quickly in a Nuc because the bees have no idea how long they will be in this new home. They only know that the Nuc was suitable for the size of the colony. But soon the Nuc will be overflowing with new worker bees as the queen begins laying.

A five framed Nuc, with 3 pounds of bees and a young queen can become over crowded in a matter of two months or less. So as the beekeeper, it is your job to have a suitable standard box set-up for the bees prior to over crowding.

Also, as a beekeeper, you are looking for maximum return for your labor and expense. There are two payoffs: colonies that survive the Winter and excess honey for your own use - in that order. Without the first, this will be your last crop of honey without investing in new bees the following Spring.

Nucs are ideal boxes to produce new queens in. This is a very simple process IF you already have a laying queen in another colony. Simply search in a colony for frames with cells filled with eggs or small larva. Remove the frame with the eggs and a healthy number of worker bees. IMPORTANT: be sure that you don't remove the queen from the existing colony, or you will make THAT colony raise a new queen instead of the Nuc.

In the Nuc, place the frame with eggs and worker, also grab a frame with honey and place in the Nuc. This is really the minimal requirements to have the workers create a new queen from the eggs you've placed in the Nuc. But I also like to add one more frame, preferably with some pollen or more honey and also two other empty frames, thus filling the box with all 5 frames.

Here is reasoning. When a hive is completely filled with frames, it prevents the workers from building wax except where it should be drawn, on the frames. Random wax can make it nearly impossible to easily inspect the box and frames without destroying the wax cells and killing the bees, even the queen.

Also, By giving the hive a Brood Frame, honey frame and frame with pollen or nectar store, the bees have a good combination of food at hand and can better concentrate on queen rearing and home building. The empty frames with drawn foundation are areas for the bees to fill, so they will quickly return to foraging as well as preparing for the new queen.

I go into queen making elsewhere in the course, but it is a simple principle that worker bees live by, if their are viable eggs in a box, they will prepare and nurture those eggs, larva and pupa into one to three queens. They will not just fly back to the old colony, even if the old colony is just feet away. So just by taking a few frames with eggs in it from an existing hive, you can start a new one. Roughly 21 days from the time you start the Nuc as a starter box, you will have a young queen emerge from her peanut shaped cell.