Suitcase Nucs And Bee Math

I have a friend who recently explained to me how she started out with a dozen chickens and now has somewhere in the neighborhood of 75. It’s chicken math, apparently. You start with a tidy little handful, you let some of them hatch their eggs, you don’t find homes for all the pullets and you can’t bear the thought of eating them for dinner. Next thing you know, you’re building a bigger chicken coop and hoping your husband won’t notice the yard is awash in hens.Turns out honeybees abide by an equally complex system of mathematics, although their numbers don’t seem to steadily rise—at least not in our case. For us, it tends to be a zero sum game. We started out with one hive, which was daunting enough for totally ignorant newcomers to beekeeping. But when we came very close to losing that hive the first year, we decided to add a second hive. Having two hives gives you some options if one goes belly up. You can take a frame of brood from a strong hive and put it in the weaker hive to pump them up. You can split a strong hive into two hives, or combine them both into one hive if it ends up being a really bad year and both hives are weak. The bottom line is you generally don’t end up losing all your bees and having to start from scratch.

This year, with one strong hive and one very weak hive coming out of winter, we decided to add two hives for insurance. (And because I like playing with bees, so the more the merrier.) In the past, we’ve gotten our bees through the Long Island Beekeeping Association, which brings a truckload of nucs, or small colonies of bees, up from the south every spring. The upside to this is you get your bees early, usually by mid-April, because the warm weather down south gives them a head start. The downside is you’re getting southern bees, not acclimated to our winters. With colony deaths running at over 40 percent last year, northern bees seemed like a good idea. So we found a beekeeper upstate with nucs for sale.

Now all we needed to do was get them here. None of us wanted to drive through the city, so bee pusher Mike offered to meet us at the ferry in Bridgeport. Sounded good. Until Charlie suggested we walk on the ferry instead of driving on to save money. Made sense, except for the part where we’re getting back on the ferry with 10,000 annoyed bees. That seemed potentially problematic. Charlie had a solution: duffel bags. So we headed to Connecticut with two huge empty bags. Mike was waiting in the parking lot at the ferry, as promised, and we quickly stuffed the nucs into the bags and got back on the same ferry.

I was a little nervous about our suitcase nucs. I had this vision of someone in authority demanding to see the contents of the bag, and then having the bees poof out in a livid swarm when we unzipped it. Homeland security here we come! I’m sure I looked as nervous and guilty as someone carrying suitcase nucs should, but we managed to get them back home and into their permanent boxes without incident.

Besides being acclimated to our winters, these bees are also Russians, a honeybee variety that tends to fare a little better than the more common Italian type against varroa mites. Varroa mites suck the blood of honeybees, leaving them weak and susceptible to everything from disease to wasp raiding parties. They are especially fond of snuggling into drone larvae and fattening themselves up during part of their life cycle. According to our upstate bee pusher, Russian queens take breaks in their egg-laying, leaving the mites without host larvae and helping to break their breeding cycle.

As luck would have it, we got the new colonies just in time. The weak hive we’d been nursing along didn’t make it. So we started the season with two colonies, added two more and now we have three. Bee math strikes again.