Completely new to beekeeping questions

6 Flow Frames yes. The brood box has 8 standard frames…

So the root of my question is as follows: Is one 4 frame NUC sufficient for the 8 brood box frames?

Yes, you would pull 4 of the frames out of the brood chamber and swap out for the frames in the Nuc. Keep the extra frames handy if you want to swap out frames to get new comb down the road. Some suggest changing out frames and wax every two seasons to help prevent disease and pests taking hold.

If you want to expand your apiary you now have a Nuc box with empty frames to fill it. So you could down the road when the hive is strong split out some frames and create your own nuc which will pull a Queen cell (or buy a queen for it). Now you have two hives for the price of one so to speak. And your “cost” on the original Nuc theoretically goes down.

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@bmoggach sorry I misunderstood. Yes a 4 frame Nuc used to replace 4 frames from the Brood box.

I thought you were talking about 4 Flow Frames.

You will always want extra frames don’t just get the bare min.

And they will simply just reproduce enough bees to build a colony to fill the other frames in the brood box?

Yep, that’s the queens job. Laying upwards of 1500-2000 eggs per day.

How long do you think it takes to build a full colony out? Once they ‘swam’ is that when you would typically add a second hive?

I’m so excited to begin. I can thank you all enough for answering my questions over and over. I really hope I’m not a bother, really, I just want to make sure my bees are well cared for. I have lots of reading to do before the hive arrives in February.

How long do you think it takes to build a full colony out? Once they ‘swam’ is that when you would typically add a second hive?

The object of the game is to KEEP them from swarming:

The reasons for keeping them from swarming is that you are unlikely to catch the swarm (either you’re not there or they land high up in a tree where they are inaccessible) and once they swarm you have about half as many bees and half as much stores (they take as much as they can carry). So your honey crop is often over for that year for that hive. It takes a “critical mass” of bees to make a good honey crop and to get that without them swarming requires a bit of trickery. First there is what Dean Stiglitz calls the “every expanding tree trunk” trick. We keep adding boxes and they keep getting the feeling that that overhead space should be full of honey. If that doesn’t do it, next there is what Dean calls the “damaged brood nest” trick. You open up the brood nest leaving gaps the need to be filled (empty frames with no foundation) and the unemployed nurse bees start hanging in festoons and get occupied with building comb, which the queen quickly lays in and now they are employed nursing the young. If that seems to be failing (judging by the building of swarm cells) I would do the “we must have already swarmed while I was out…” trick. Which is a split. You make a new colony before they do.

If all of this fails and they swarm anyway, I wouldn’t feel too bad. Only successful hives swarm. But as a beekeeper you like to have those bees in your hive instead of the trees. You can still try to catch the swarm

or have bait hives out to hopefully get them to move in.

But sometimes you lose them anyway.

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A 2# package of bees will have approx 8000 bees in it. A healthy hive will have approx 40,000 bees in it. The average developmental period for workers is 21 days. So starting three weeks from when you set up the colony you could have 1500-2000 new bees per day hatching. With a percentage of the older bees dying at the same time each day. But potentially you could have a fully stocked hive within about two months depending on nectar and pollen availability.(21 days + 2000 bees x 30days ≈ 60,000 bees - die off ≈ 40,000 bees after 50-60 days). That would be assuming that you have perfect conditions and cells ready to lay in from the first day etc etc. There are a lot of factors that go into it, so it’s pretty hard to give you a firm time line.