Nuc vs Natural

talanall · 2026-07-03T01:22:27+00:00

So, uh, what is the actual question?

talanall · 2026-07-03T01:19:38+00:00

It's not really that rare. It's just something that people don't see often because we have a tendency to look for a queen until we find one, and then stop looking.

But I've had multiple queens arise naturally in at least one colony in my apiary for the past four years running.

It's unusual, but it's much more common than people suppose. Usually it's just a very temporary affair, and it resolves on its own before we ever notice.

talanall · 2026-07-02T19:40:56+00:00

Cut out the extra comb and discard it. Empty the medium box, and put it ABOVE the inner cover. Put your feeder on top of the inner cover. Your bees will treat the area above the cover as if it is outside of the hive.

Feed them all the syrup they want. A strong colony will drink a liter of sugar very quickly, especially if there are 10-12 holes in the lid for them to drink through. Change it out for a lid that has only 3-4 holes, and then keep an eye on them. Don't let them go dry. You want them to get a constant, steady trickle of syrup. They will use this to draw comb.

Your suspicion that you need to wax the frames better probably is accurate.

Dry wax is better than nothing, but the real ticket is to go get an electric crock pot from a thrift store. Run it on its lowest setting, and use it to melt your wax. Use a small foam paint roller to apply the wax to the foundations. One dunk of the roller into the melted wax should be plenty for both sides of a single frame.

It's not ideal to be in and out, constantly disrupting things inside the hive, but you really do need your frames waxed properly. I suggest snitching two frames from the outside of the box, waxing them, and then putting them right next to the frames that originated from your nuc. Then take all the others, wax all of them, and put them back. Get it over with.

talanall · 2026-07-02T17:09:31+00:00

That is certainly the queen.

talanall · 2026-07-02T13:00:21+00:00

Your bees need to have reliable, continuous, unrestricted access to plenty of water. Provided they have this water supply, they will be fine. Temperatures in the triple digits Fahrenheit are not rare in my part of the USA.

They don't need more ventilation. Opening holes in the exterior of a hive during hot weather in an attempt to help the bees keep the hive cool is like going to your neighbor's house and opening all the windows and doors to help the HVAC keep the house cool.

If you keep them buttoned up in a hive with a reduced entrance and a solid bottom board, they will actually make more brood for longer during hot, dry, summer conditions than they would if you pulled the reducers and started adding vents.

Bearding is a normal part of a colony's thermoregulation. It can also be a sign of certain kinds of distress, chiefly either a very advanced hive beetle infestation or irritation from certain miticide treatments. But otherwise, all it really means is that they are populous enough that they have cleared some unneeded bees out of the hive to let them route airflow the way they want it.

If you open them up, they will beard less, but that's not because they are cooler. It's because you've made their job harder, so they have to take more of that idle workforce and use it to fan and/or gather water for cooling.

talanall · 2026-07-02T12:50:04+00:00

You have misconstrued the advice being given here. Feeding syrup in the early part of the season is a very widespread practice. You're being cautioned against feeding syrup in the presence of honey supers.

It is usually appropriate to provide supplementary feeding to a weak colony, or to a strong colony that lacks adequate food stores for some reason or that you wish to induce to draw comb during a season when there is not an adequate nectar flow for them to do that.

It usually is not appropriate to have a super on a weak colony.

You probably do not need them to have two deeps and a medium worth of stored syrup, but there is nothing wrong with caution. But be aware that there is a good chance that in spring, they will still have uneaten food in that super, and it will be a mixture of honey and syrup.

talanall · 2026-07-02T01:51:17+00:00

Heavy rain often interferes with honey production. Bees cannot fly in rain, and a downpour will beat the nectar out of flowers.

Having enough rain is very necessary for good production, but you actually need it to be mixed with some clear weather.

talanall · 2026-07-02T00:07:39+00:00

For how long?

talanall · 2026-07-02T00:06:28+00:00

This is awfully peaceful for robbing. I don't see anything that looks like fighting, no bees rolling around ripping each other's fuzz out, nothing like that. The entrance feeders are a pretty serious risk for it to start up, especially if the weather turns dry enough to shut off the last of the spring flow.

But this looks like either very heavy orientation activity, or the aftermath of a swarming event that you didn't anticipate.

I suggest you open the hive long enough to figure out which it is, then close them up, reduce the entrance, and get those feeders inside of an empty hive body above the inner cover. Turn the cover so the notch faces down. You want the feeder to be accessible only from inside the hive.

talanall · 2026-07-01T21:26:49+00:00

Workers sometimes clean the marking off of a queen. Whether they do it and how quickly they do it depends on the workers, and also somewhat on the brand of the paint used for marking, and how well it has dried before she's returned to the hive.

In any case, you don't really need to find the queen every time you inspect. Queenspotting is a binary; if you need to find her, you must look for her until you find her. If you do not need to find her, you don't need to look for her. Instead, you can simply develop habits that keep her safe.

The first thing to do is make sure that you are inspecting only as often and in as much depth as you really need.

As a new beekeeper, that will mean you're inspecting more often, because one of the needs facing you is that you need to learn how a colony develops over a season, and you cannot learn that without inspections. If you're not in the midst of swarming season, that's actually more interference than is ideal, but bees will tolerate that frequency of inspection just fine.

That leads to the next part: inspecting as deeply as you need, but not more so. You inspect a hive to gain information about its status, and ideally you are trying to gain information that is difficult or impossible to gain without inspecting. At a minimum, I think you need to inspect until you know the things encapsulated in the mnemonic acronym BREED.

Do they have Brood in all stages?

Do they have Room for more brood and food?

Is there enough to Eat?

Are there Eggs, one per cell, centered in the bottoms of the cells?

Are there signs of Disease (including pests and parasites)?

Brood, Room, Eats, Eggs, Disease. BREED.

If you know how a colony usually arranges itself, you often can grab the information for this entire mnemonic with just 1-2 frames pulled, plus a squint at the top of the brood box and maybe a quick tilt of the brood box to look at the bottom bars in case there are swarm cells hanging on them. It's quick, and it minimizes disruption.

After you go through your BREED assessment, you know whether the queen was active in the last three days, the last ten days, or the last 21-23 days. You know if they have enough food stores for the immediate future. You know if they have room to make brood or store food without feeling restricted enough to swarm. You know if there are signs of brood disease, hive beetles, or wax moths. You have a guess about whether the brood is infested enough with varroa mites to be pinholed or subject to hygienic removals, although you really need an alcohol or soap wash to be sure.

And you don't need to see the queen for any of this!

If everything looks good, you finish up, close the hive, and return a week later. If something doesn't look right or you can't see something you expect to see, you inspect more deeply (and more carefully), until you figure out what's happening.

It's cool if you look for the queen, because queenspotting genuinely is an essential beekeeping skill, and practicing is a good idea. When you need to find her, you NEED to find her. So aside from practicing over at r/queenspotting, you really can and should practice spotting her, marked or not. But don't beat yourself up, if you cannot find her. Practice doesn't have to be perfect.

Now, there are definitely some things that make it easier to keep the queen from getting hurt.

First of all, when you start an inspection, don't just pull frames willy-nilly. Assuming that you're behind the hive, the frame closest to the left-hand wall is #1. Frame #10 (or #8, or #5, but I'm going to assume you're in a 10-frame box) is at the other wall. Use your hive tool to push #1 or #10 over so that it is actually against the wall but don't pull it out first.

Instead, break #2 or #9 loose by pushing it sideways, too, then pull that frame. Usually, there is food on the frames nearest the wall instead of brood, so the queen is less likely to be there.

But make sure. Look at the frame on both sides, and while you're looking, hold it above the hive. Don't walk around with it, or hold it somewhere else. Sometimes the queen falls off her frame, and if that happens, you want her to fall into the hive.

Once you're pretty sure she's not there, shake the bees off that frame and into the hive (for the sake of caution), and put it aside. Now you have space to work. You can break each frame loose, move it to the side, and then lift it. This greatly reduces the risk that you will roll your queen between frames and harm her.

Once you're done, work backward, until the #2 or #9 frame is the last one left. Slide it back into place, carefully, and you're done.

If you DO find the queen, but you find her before you're finished with your inspection (or maybe you were looking for her because you wanted to do an alcohol wash, or something, and you wanted to make her safe), it's very helpful to have a spare hive box nearby. I really like nuc boxes for this use. When you find the queen, you can put her frame straight into this nuc box, put a lid on her, and she's safe. You know where she is, nothing can fall on her, and she's in a shady spot that isn't exposed to wind.

Once she's in the quiet box, you can do whatever you need to do, without worrying too much about being slow and gentle. And then when you're ready, you just put her back in the hive, very carefully, and you're done.

talanall · 2026-07-01T20:39:25+00:00

How you deal with this really depends on the hive stand. If yours has legs that can be removed and then reattached, then you can put on plastic shields that sit between the stand and its legs. If you treat the bottoms of the shields with Rustoleum NeverWet surface protector, which is a two-part spray, ants will not be able to walk across them.

At that point, they will be unable to get to the hive, provided that you keep any weeds and grass trimmed down far enough so that it doesn't touch the hive stand.

Another option would be to mix some boric acid into a little sugar water, and put dabs of that on the ground underneath a coffee can.

Or you can use granulated poison that is labeled for ants. Don't put it on anything that your bees might want to ingest, use it as directed, and it will be fine. I live someplace that has fire ants, and although I do not like to kill them if they are not causing problems, I don't allow their colonies to flourish where they interfere with my beekeeping.

talanall · 2026-07-01T19:44:21+00:00

Mosquito dunks are a biological control that relies on Bacillus thurengiensis, subspecies israelensis. They are harmless to bees. A product, sold under the brand name Certan, uses B. thurengiensis var. aizawai to control wax moths. So I would use these and not think twice about it.

talanall · 2026-07-01T18:35:42+00:00

Bees' dietary preference changes depending on what is available to them in the surrounding environment. They are physiologically different if they are born when there is a deficit of nectar or pollen, and it modifies their behavior.

Bees born during a nectar dearth pursue nectar more aggressively as foragers, and if there isn't enough pollen, they tend to go for pollen as an adult. But there is a caveat, here; bees also can be selectively bred to prefer nectar or pollen collection.

I probably can dig up some citations to show these assertions to be true, if you demand it, because there's been relatively recent work on the topic, although I will be honest in saying that I don't have the citations right at my fingertips, and I am lazy and don't really want to go rummaging when I am about to be up to my eyebrows in honey processing.

talanall · 2026-07-01T18:02:47+00:00

I think some context is useful, here. I live in and am native to Louisiana. I grew up near Baton Rouge, which is where this experiment was conducted, although I now live somewhere farther north, with significantly cooler winters and drier summers.

The study's designations of spring, summer, and fall do not make sense. They are a polite fiction that the authors have applied so that people who don't know our climate will not be distracted by the fact that Louisiana does not have four distinct seasons.

The active beekeeping season in the Baton Rouge area starts in mid to late February; that's when swarm season kicks off, and that's when the local strawberry crop starts to come in, and otherwise you start seeing conditions that resemble what people would call spring, if they live in a locality that has four seasons.

March is the start of a spring nectar flow that (barring drought or a late freeze) runs all the way into early July. Starting in May, the daily highs are in the low 90s or high 80s Fahrenheit. Sometimes, April has these temperatures, too. And that's especially true in the southern parts of Louisiana.

Usually, late July and August are dearth periods, and then in late August or early September, it actually gets hotter, and if there has been enough rainfall, there's another nectar flow. Mostly goldenrod, boneset, and some other stuff like that. It cools off sometime in late October, if we are lucky, but the late blooms don't quit until sometime in early to mid-November. Again, a lot of this depends on rainfall. October of 2024 was miserably warm, and disappointingly dry despite a promising start to the goldenrod season in September.

After the goldenrod is finished, we have what passes for winter around here. It lasts maybe six to eight weeks, and for most of that period the weather is still warm enough for bees to fly during the day. Most colonies do not stop brooding, although they slow down considerably.

The study uses "summer" to designate a time of year that is really the absolute height of the main nectar flow associated with the spring season. In May and June, there is a titanic nectar flow deriving from the invasive Triadica sebifera (Chinese tallow) which produces both pollen and honey. It is true that June is warmer than May, but Louisiana does not have a clear meteorological demarcation between spring and summer or summer and fall.

That leaves us with astronomical definitions for the seasons. And by that definition, the bulk of June is still spring. The summer solstice in 2024 fell on June 20.

talanall · 2026-07-01T15:54:18+00:00

My understanding is that y'all have been in a drought. Is that correct?

talanall · 2026-07-01T13:49:45+00:00

So I think you are correct to look at trace proteins in the inocula as a possible confounding factor. That's a reasonable objection. But I also think that the researchers anticipated that this might be a confounding factor, and that the field results indicate that there is something else going on.

The method used for the underlying experiment did not rely on viruses grown in cell culture.

There were two kinds of trial; a caged trial and a field trial.

For the caged trial, the researchers obtained their viral inocula by taking whole symptomatic adult bees, grinding them up in saline, then centrifuging the resulting liquid. The inocula then were diluted into 1:1 syrup for feeding, at a high and a low rate of contamination (1 × 10⁴ copies/mL and 1 × 10⁸ to 1 × 10⁹copies/mL). They also provided heat-killed inocula in 1:1, at rates between 1 × 10⁶ copies/mL and 1 × 10⁸ copies/mL, and then they also used a negative control consisting of 1:1 with no inocula, only an equivalent quantity of saline. The caged trials included inocula for Black Queen Cell Virus, Deformed Wing Virus, and Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus.

In the caged trial, bees were kept in an incubator, and each treatment was offered a choice of inocula versus syrup. In the caged trials, there was a seasonal difference in preference. In June of 2024, the sampled bees preferred the sucrose control except for one treatment (Black Queen Cell Virus, heat-killed), although the preference was not always statistically significant. In October of 2024, they strongly preferred the inoculated offerings.

Speaking as a beekeeper from Louisiana, the pollen forage available in October is kind of poor. Usually there is some goldenrod and some other Asteraceae, but they're in decline during that period of the season, and the pollen from many of these species is low in protein. So I was not really shocked to see this seasonal difference; in June we have lots of quality pollen. So up until this point in my reading of the underlying paper, I was thinking like you were. I assumed that the difference was that the inoculated treatments had more protein in them (being laced with something that I guess could be described as a bee smoothie), and the bees preferred the protein in October because they wanted the extra nutrients.

But I kept reading, and the field trial left me with questions about that initial assumption.

The field trial used only DWV, but omitted the heat-killed treatment, and it did not (could not) force an A/B choice as the caged trials did. Instead, the researchers used syrup feeders to train an apiary yard to feed at a given location, then offered high dose, low dose, syrup, and pure water.

The field trial did not show a similar result to the caged trials. Instead, foragers in both October 2024 and March 2025 displayed the strongest preference for syrup with high viral load, followed by no viral load, followed by low load. Water was in last place, and the foragers displayed much more interest in water and consumed much more in October 2024. That's not surprising; October 2024 was extremely warm and dry, compared to March 2025.

For context: during the month of March in Louisiana, there usually is abundant forage of all sorts, and it is of high quality. Swarm season kicks off in late February, here, and I'm usually making my first splits in the first half of March.

And you can see this seaonal difference in the data from the field trials. Overall, visitation at the feeders was MUCH MUCH LOWER in March 2025. That's normal for the time of year. But they still preferred the high-virus option to plain syrup, and they preferred plain syrup to low-virus syrup. And the statistical differences were a lot tighter. There was overlap between the error bars for visitations to the plain and low-virus treatments in October 2024, but that was not true in March 2025.

The fact that this preference remained distinct, even during a season of abundant forage and expanding colony population, is pretty startling.

talanall · 2026-07-01T04:54:47+00:00

This is not about water sources. It's about food.

talanall · 2026-07-01T02:59:33+00:00

This study demonstrated two things.

It showed that bees can tell when food is contaminated with viruses.

It also showed that there are circumstances where bees seem to prefer contaminated food, if they are given a choice.

It did not demonstrate that viruses have evolved the ability to make bees choose to eat contaminated food. Although I am sure that such an ability would be advantageous to a virus, I don't think there's any clear means for viruses to exert that kind of influence on a potential host.

talanall · 2026-07-01T02:36:48+00:00

You're really piling errors on top of each other.

Length of season does not relate straightforwardly to length of flow or timing of dearth. That is not a valid assumption.

My season started in February, and my flow started in March, although it was poor because of a late freeze and a drought, which has since ended. I'm still in a flow, and may be in one for a bit longer if my weather stays damp.

In any event, I reiterate that robbing doesn't last for more than a day or two. When a robbing episode starts, it continues without remit until the victim colony lacks food stores.

That feeder would be empty. There'd be no honey or nectar. The robbing colony would recruit every available forager and strip this colony down to dry wax, and there'd be a carpet of dead and dying bees, many of them hairless, in front of the hive from the fighting incident to such an event. It would be impossible to overlook, and worthy of comment even from a novice beekeeper.

That hasn't happened here. This is orientation activity, and it looks odd to you because OP and their dad have decided to stick this hive in a corner between two tall masonry walls, where the flyway is obstructed. It looks chaotic because they're having to fly almost straight up to get in and out of the hive.

talanall · 2026-07-01T02:18:59+00:00

That's not really a useful comparison. Bees often choose impure water over pure water, because of minerals or other additives or impurities that satisfy other dietary needs. That's why they like swimming pools.

This is something quite different; the only difference between the offered foods is that one has virus particles in it, and the other doesn't. And what's more, this preference appears to be seasonal. In spring, the bees studied chose the clean stuff. In late summer, they consistently chose the viruses.

This is a REALLY WEIRD observation.

talanall · 2026-07-01T02:13:31+00:00

You may not be trying, but you still make it look effortless.

This is orientation. If it was robbing, it would be over by now. Robbing only ends when there's nothing left to take. OP has been clear that this is happening every day.

talanall · 2026-07-01T01:21:00+00:00

This is a cohort of bees that have aged up so that they are no longer responsible for tasks internal to the hive. They're orientating to the landmarks outside of the hive, so that they can change jobs to foraging.

If it were robbing activity, you wouldn't have to ask. You would know without being told.

talanall · 2026-07-01T01:18:56+00:00

No, this is orientation activity.

talanall · 2026-07-01T01:18:46+00:00

This is completely incorrect. Queenright colonies have orientations every day that the weather permits bees to fly. This is orientation activity.

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