More Nucs Needed

Something handy to have knocking about is a few Nucs or Nucleus Hives, small hives 2 to 8 frames wide to house smaller bee colonies. They've got a lot of uses I tend to use them to hive swarms, store spare Queens or even hatch spare Queen cells. I've made two already but as my number of hives has increased so has my need for support colonies and I want some free for swarm collection too, so I decided to make some more.

A friend nearby replaced her living room floor last year and gave me the spare floorboards. My plan was to make Nucs and brood boxes with them. First job was to attach the boards to each other. Floorboards have a tongue and groove so I decided to put some glue in there and clamp them whilst they cured. runing a bead of glue down the groove and one either side of the tongue I used a hammer to knock them together and a few gimp pins to temporarily hold them in place. I gave the glue a few days to cure before removing the clamps. After that it was onto the tablesaw to cut lengths the right width and remove the top tongue.

Glueing

Sawing

Cutting the tongues off the top of the floorboards I had a bit of a misshap. One of the thin offcuts got caught by a tooth on the spinning blade which propelled it forwards at an impressive turn of speed. The offcut went straight into the top of my left hand. It was a bit like being shot with an arrow, albeit one with a square profile and a jaggy mess instead of a pointy bit. Immediately concerned about my patio I grabbed bucket to catch the dripping claret whilst I had a think and checked the damage. Deciding I couldn't really work anymore that evening and noticing it was getting painful to close my hand and a large lump was growing under the puncture I thought a trip to A&E was probably the best course so grabbing some reading material and putting a carrier bag over my hand off I went. The Nurse Practitioner I saw turned out to be a beekeeper too. Anyway it was relatively good news, there was nothing broken in the hand. I'd nicked a vein and had a nice big haematoma developing which would dissipate with time. I popped back home to photograph the crime scene for posterity. A month later and a few rainfalls have done a great job of cleaning the patio, looking at the hand the puncture is barely visible but there's a hard little lump of scar tissue above the second and third metacarpal -pretty sure that'll break down eventually. Maybe I'll have a go at attaching a riving knife to the saw, maybe not.

Safety first

After a week or so I resumed work on the Nucs. Previously I've cut box joints when making nucs but this is really overkill as they won't be bearing much weight so glue and screws or even nails should be fine.I opted to use wood glue and six 40mm screws per corner, probably still more than needed really.

Nuc bodies. Going to need some excess glue scraping off later.

I decided to make Open Mesh Floors so I can check varroa drop if I want to but as the needs of a Nuc are different to a large colony I made the sliding bottom board fit in two postitions, one snug to the mesh so it's like a normal solid floor as far as the bees are concerned and one lower down to leave a cavity for mites to get stuck in when I want to check the drop. For the mesh I used sections cut from a piece I bought online from C. Wynne Jones. The correx bottom boards were cut from a fly tipped estate agent sign I found -I guess whoever bought the property wanted rid of the sign sooner than the estate agent wanted to go and collect it. Previously I've cut the entrance into the hive body but with these I made it part of the floor instead.

Making the floors.

The Nuc Roofs were made from chipboard I used the offcuts from the lengths of floorboard to make the sides. Initially I glued the roof sides and tacked them down with a few nails before drilling guide holes and putting screws in. Roof sides take a bit of hammer being used to pick up the roof and support things placed on top of them. A 22mm batton went around the inside of the roof to leave a space above the crownboard.

Nearly finished.

They were finished with roofing felt. I've found roofing felt difficult to use before but this time I scored the underside of the felt and ran a blowtorch over the corners to soften them before folding and nailing them. Seemed to work. The crownboards are just plywood with a rim glued and nailed in place and a feeding hole cut in the middle, each Nuc also has a little ply square that lives above the crownboard to cover or reduce the hole when they're not being fed.

Two Commercial Nucs.

I gave them a coat of green Shed & Fence paint, then drilled a couple of holes in the sides of the roof and slid some spare mesh up beneath the felt for ventilation. I later added wire clips to hold the floor and body together too to make carrying easier. Two more 5 frame Nucs added to the inventory. They were populated with bees the afternoon they were finished.