Hey everybody, I'm back out here at Zenger Farm
Today we're going to have several students come out to learn how to install a nuc
or a nucleus hive, into a big hive.
And so I thought I'd show you how that's done.
Yesterday I went and picked up 6 nucs
from a local supplier, Bridgetown Bees, here in Portland
and brought them out to the farm, set them up
The first thing you do when you pick up a nuc is you want to go and put it where the hive is going to be
In the exact location. Then open it up and let them fly.
These bees have been here for about 24 hours, so they've been orienting to this location
You don't have to wait a whole day, you can do it after a couple hours
Go ahead and make that transfer.
But today we needed to wait a day for everyone to get here.
One of the things you may notice is different here is we have a solar panel.
That is to provide power to a new monitoring system that we got.
Bee-Certain.com donated 2 monitoring systems
These include hive scales and humidity and temperature sensors
So I'll be showing you that today as well.
The solar panel powers the data controller and wifi hotspot
And the white tube houses the outdoor temperature and humidity sensor
From the wifi hotspot we can view and download the data from the sensors
These charts show data gathered before the bees were installed
So they don't really mean anything at the moment.
-- Is that good?
-- Yeah, and then the lid
You don't want those shims interfering with the lid
So the lid is free to sit on those 4 points of contact
-- Does it have to be centered, or does it matter?
-- Yeah, as close to center as you can.
Joe has his 2 empty frames in place on one side of the hive
-- Do I need to smoke them?
-- Nah
Then he's going to carefully pull a frame out of the nuc
and it's going to go into the hive body.
So what's on that frame?
What do we got?
Oh, it looks like a lot of good brood.
So as you put it in, watch the shoulders of the frame so the bees don't get squashed between the shoulders
And you want to carefully put it in and...
let those shoulders of the frames touch.
So it sounds like these are unmarked queens.
So if you're looking for a marked one you may not find one.
-- Oh, there she is. Right there.
-- Did you find her?
Oh, yeah, I see her
So we found the queen.
-- So now we know she's on this side of the frame we need to be extra careful when we...
-- Yeah. She may move to the other side though
But you do want to treat every frame like the queen is on it really
Now that, I would hope, would have honey on it.
-- It's heavier.
-- So we'll want to actually space that frame out one.
Although, it has brood on the other side, so...
-- That's honey right there.
-- Yeah, that's all capped honey on that side.
But the other side has brood.
So what we can do is actually leave it, let's not space it, because we don't want to separate that brood
from the rest of the brood, we want to keep that nest continuous.
But what we can do is slide all of the other frames over and put the 3 (empty) frames where we had 2
So, let those frames touch so we don't squish bees
Go ahead and move it up with the other frames, then we can move all 7 of those and put a 3rd frame on the outside
You can turn it sideways and push them all as one unit
Now you can fit a 3rd (empty) frame in that end
And then the other 2 can go on the other side
-- Now, why did I do that?
-- Oh, because this frame here has a lot of honey on this side
And we don't want that honey breaking up the brood nest, we want the brood nest to grow and be bigger
So we want more space for brood and we didn't want to separate this frame from the others
because it does have brood on one side
So now they can put honey on these outer frames, which they'll probably do.
But they have a couple extra frames for brood.
So we've got the humidity and temperature sensor in place
This is from Bee-Certain.com
The orientation of the sensor is such so that the bees don't put wax or propolis over the electronics
so that they don't gum it up.
And that is small enough so that we don't violate bee-space.
And the little antenna sticking off to the side.
And the last step is to shake the bees off into the hive.
Just give it a - don't wack it on to the hive - just give it a forceful (shake)
And you can even bang on the bottom of the box if you want
The reason we don't want to wack it on to the hive is we just end up squishing bees when we do that
and messing them up in there
Now it can be set off to the side and the rest of the bees in there can fly out
Now the inner cover goes on, and it goes on gently, you don't want to squish the bees
-- Does it matter which side that the feeder's going to be
-- That one it doesn't matter. Some do, but that one doesn't.
Then you can put the feeder on.
We've got the feeder on and we don't want the feeder exposed to sunlight, so we cover it with another box
Normally we'd use an empty box, but we don't have that option today.
And the lid goes on, and that's it.
The nuc is moved in.
Now we just watch it. Watch it grow.
That's all. We're done installing the nucs.
I hope you guys have fun installing your own nucs too.