Many of our queens are mated in mini-nucleus boxes, designed for that purpose. They are taken to the apiary with colonies selected for improving varroa tolerance, hopefully via varroa sensitive hygiene (VSH). Once mated and laying, ideally the queens are moved into larger nuclei, using standard frames and fed so they grow into full-sized colonies or used carefully to replace a poor queen. They can also be kept until they can be united with a colony which needs a replacement queen. The minis are too small to use as starter colonies, since they are primarily mating nuclei. Some early queens are reared in strong nuclei, which, once the new queen is laying and the colony growth is stimulated correctly, are suitable for a late harvest, such as heather, or, if reared early enough can give a good surplus on the July bramble flow. Any surplus nuclei are available for sale by collection only, preferably to local beekeepers, particularly for a new beekeeeper or a beekeeper new to West Cornwall. These can be pre-ordered. The queenless mini-nucs can be reused by adding a protected queen cell and getting the bees to support the replacement queen.
Early reared queens are particularly useful: to requeen a swarming colony which had been split and all cells removed; for sale in nuclei with reasonable hope of a summer harvest; to build up quickly and used to replace unsuitable queens, especially in bad tempered colonies. In 2009 we replaced two highly defensive colonies with strong nuclei moved into full sized boxes, moved the replaced colony nearby, allowed the flying bees from the defensive colony to augment the new colony and used the frames of brood and young bees (minus poor queen) to both augment that colony and also some other nuclei to build them up quickly.
We use 3-frame and 6 frame nucleus boxes, made to the same design as our full sized plywood based boxes. A local woodworking shop makes up timber to the correct profiles for top and bottom edges (British National design is more complicated than the National Commercial, Langstroth and Smith hives, their long frame lugs requiring an extension to the hive width).
To discuss the possibility of acquiring a nucleus email James in the first instance.
