PS.
Bush farms talk a lot of sense and there is an excellent article about installing package bees here
http://www.bushfarms.com/beespackages.htm
There is a very interesting bit about not caging the queen.
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Congratulations with all the swarms. I hope you are quarantining them and treating with oxalic as the rest of your bees are varroa free.
Last year…which was an excellent year for bees…the nuc I bought made 3 supers of honey! Plus all the honey in the brood nest. This year is much slower but they are now on 2 brood boxes and have filled one super despite the poor weather.
My langsthroth nuc is now ready for occupation. I am undecided how I will do this as I am unlikely to get a swarm. I have thought of doing the manipulation where you make a slope with a board…tip the bees onto it a foot away from the hive entrance…the bees walk up the slope and over the edge…taking the queen with them. This represents to proportions of a swarm. The flying bees can return to the hive. You then hive the new ‘swarm’ as usual and the flyers stay with the brood and make a new queen…or you can use a new queen for them. It seems a good way of doing it without involving putting national frames into the nuc and having to rotate them out. What do you think?
A Taranov board. I tried this once as a very inexperienced beekeeper in an effort to find the queen. It worked but was very messy, bees everywhere. Never again.
Can you not just do a shook swarm into a full hive and split later?
I’m intrigued. I wasn’t referring to pesticides.
What husbandry measures do you take to keep varroa down?
I know beekeepers who use foundation-less frames and cull drones with some measure of success but a swarm is an unknown entity. It will be SHB one day…
They will still be on national frames though.
Yes they would be. That’s what I want to avoid. I have a number of nucs to choose from if I want to move one into the langsthroth. Just don’t want the frame change! I have very quiet bees so I am not worried about tipping them out. If the weather would improve! It would help. Also, I don’t really want to introduce new bees to my apiary. It’s a quandary!
I don’t cull drones either - and have had no problems. Michael Bush also leaves drones alone (bees decided how many drones they need and will build to what they need), and has had no varroa problems since regression, which was a goodly number of years ago.
I’m with DextersShed - hands-off until hands-on is a must.
Speaking of quarantines, there is a county in Utah that is considering not allowing migratory commercial operations to set up shop to protect the diversity/purity of their stock. Now that I find really interesting and will be watching to see what happens.
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I don’t treat unless a sugar roll/drone uncap indicates I should and then only with oxalic vapour.
Cull? ok this brings another set of question I have. If someone has a video Youtube on this that would be helpfull as well.
Culling? well I am sure I am not understanding. The Brood box, do I need to just leave all the frames in all the time or is there maintenance that I need to do like remove the frame and ad new ones. As you can see I have don’t have a clue.
Right…I have decided what I am going to do to get bees into my Langstroth nuc.
I have some queen cells in a hive…so I will take one and transfer it to a brood frame from one of my other hives…national frames. I will take honey stores from a colony which have too much. I will take some brood frames from a full colony. I have cut some wooden batons to fit across the Langstroth and will attach the national frames to these with plastic pull ties. Ta Daaa! There will be space for 2 Langstroth frames within the box…which they can colonise in due course. Next year…when the nuc is growing in the spring…I will move the national frames out to the sides and then replace with the Langstroth frames. If they do well this summer…I may be able to move them into a full size brood box and then the national frames can be removed earlier. If they build drone cells at the sides…well they can be culled for varroa. Glad now to have a plan.
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My bees must be maniacs. Out of 5 hives there was maybe 10 -15 drone cells. Soon I know they will haul those white bodies out theirselves. It is as if they do their own culling. I check the drone white brood in the refuse pile and there are no red mites. The only time I see more drone brood is in early spring just before the swarm cells show up. But they only make enough drones to-do-the-job. We are not in a dearth. So no reason for them to dump drones. Other than those ladies like to clean house!! 
Not trying to be snarky here, but why do you believe you are smarter then and better at being a bee then a bee? I say leave your brood chamber and frames alone other then to inspect them, but there should be no need to rearrange the frames… the bees put the stuff where they wanted it for a reason.
@Marty, sounds like you are referring to the lifespan of your frames. If so, then yes they need to be cycled and then ‘culled’ or removed. The wax becomes dirty and the cell size gets smaller with age. Your frames should be removed and cleaned every few years depending on their use. This may not be particularly helpful to you however you will learn as you go. Some beekeepers brand their frames with a date or colour to tell them when its time to change. I took a photo of the following slide from a Bee convention we had here in Australia over the weekend.
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