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McComBees Apiaries 4 Frame Nucs
Offering bees for sale at a superior value
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Only Pay for What You Need
Why would a four-frame nuc develop at the same rate as a five-frame nuc, if not faster? Randy Oliver's nuc modeling experiment (Oliver, Modeling Nuc Buildup-Scientific Beekeeping) shows that the extra bees on the fifth frame do not contribute to the colony's faster expansion. Additional frames of bees do not speed up the expansion once the maximum number of nurse bees for a given amount of brood is achieved. To put it another way, why pay for a frame of bees you do not need? When you buy a four-frame nuc from McComBees Apiaries, you can save the cost of a frame of bees.
Overwintering Success
Keeping bees can be difficult, especially at first. Even deciding who to buy bees from can be a challenging task. One option is to buy costly, mass-produced packages or nucs from a beekeeper who gets them from a southern supplier to offset their own winter losses. Alternatively, paying a fair price for locally adapted overwintered nucs raised from start to finish by a certified Indiana queen breeder who can successfully overwinter honeybees would be the best option. To increase your chances of success, buy McComBees Apiaries 4 Frame Nuc Colonies and support locally raised Indiana bees.
Established Growth
Some nuc suppliers assemble their nucs by combining frames of bees from different colonies and adding a queen right before selling. A common outcome of blending various bees is an age imbalance. This imbalance can significantly impede the colony's development, leading to the colony's rejection of the queen and the creation of a new one. My nucs are created by introducing a queen cell into an established, queenless colony. With my nucs, the colonies have been growing with queens they have accepted since inception, resulting in colonies that have reached the right age ratio of bees and are quickly expanding.
Local Adapted Traits
Understanding where your bees come from and how they are raised can impact your success as a beekeeper. Mass-produced nucs and packages are often bred from stock that prioritizes brood production. The reason being, the more brooding, the more splits. The more splits, the more sales. When you buy bees from McComBees Apiaries, the mission is to promote stock that has proven in the field to have traits that are important to Indiana beekeepers.
Quality Drawn Comb
Often a few of the frames in a five-frame nuc are likely to be old brood comb frames that need to be changed as soon as possible. Years of accumulated pesticide accumulation in old brood comb can contaminate it, impairing brood development. It is strongly encouraged to replace the brood comb after five years. But why should you be expected to pay for the old brood frames of another beekeeper? My nucs are made up of less than two-year-old frames and foundations, so there's no need to replace them anytime soon.
More Information
​For more information about McComBees Apiaries nucs and to purchase a 4 Frame Overwintered Nuc or 4 Frame Spring/Summer Nuc, click the link below and feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.