Today, we finally finished what we began in November. We opened a new Nuc yard with approx. 140 new nuc boxes to raise our bees for delivery the week after Easter. For those of you who like to know the numbers, we used over 1,200 board feet of lumber (or more then a 1/3 of a semi-truck of lumber), 140 man hours of construction, 5 gallons of paint, and 5 lbs of hive staples.
It took us approx. 15 man hours to set-up the yard. This includes going to the hardware store to pickup cement blocks, level the blocks, and set-up the stands.
What makes this yard so good, is that the nucs will receive 10 hours of daily sun light, trees shield the wind quite well, a water pond is 75 feet from the hives, and, of course, easy access for our truck. These are very important elements of commercial beekeeping.
It will take from 4 weeks to 6 weeks to grow these bees into well established nucs. This is dependent on weather and the quality of the queens. If we see a queen not being productive, we normally replace her in the first two weeks with another queen.
This week, we will begin making the nucs for our April nuc customers.
