The nucleus mating "Mini plus"
In the past, we were using some wooden MiniPlus for the production of queens during the season. The size was sufficient to overwinter some queens with a >75% success rate.
In 2012, we stopped using them for 2 reasons:
- we had to work with too many different sizes: 10-frame hives, 6-frame hives, Maxi+, Mini+ and Kielers,
- we found it hard to work with the Mini+ frames. We prefer to work with the honey chambers’ frames. Therefore, we sold our Mini+ and transformed our Maxi+ from a warm way (12 frames) into the cold way (6 frames).
starting up of the Mini+:
We fill up the Mini+ in April, during the colza blossoms, with package bees, or with the division of Mini+ and Maxi+ that overwintered.
Overwintering of the micro colonies:
We overwinter the colonies on 1 or 2 elements. In retrospect, we noticed that we had better results with overwintering on 1 element, providing that we followed correctly the reserves.
Behaviour of queens rearing in Mini-Plus on our bee farm
The different formats of hives used on our farm specializing in queen rearing and the swarms production
Multilingual apiarian lexicon
Our production 
We are French bee-keepers. Our whole production is located on a perimeter of 10 km around our town, Giroussens, which is a little village in the (...)
10-frame bee hives
We mainly operate with small size colonies. We work with only 150 Dadant 10-frame bee hives. They produce the right amount of males required for (...)
Production of honey
Until 2010, our work was more than 90% orientated on the breeding. Since the arrival of Fabienne, my wife, and Xavier, my son, our honey (...)
Production of pollen
At the beginning of spring, we place the pollen traps on about 50 hives, while the willows and cistus are flowering.
We use some pollen bottom (...)
Divisible hives
In July 2007, Mister Christian Nicot from Nicoplast establishment introduced me to his colonies behaviour in his Dadant 1 shallow-frame honey (...)
6-frame bee hives
The 6-frame bee hives represent the main element of our production. We actually own more than a 1000 and overwinter more than 800 yearly.
End of (...)
Maxi-Plus bee hives
"Maxi plus”, or “maxi +”, is our naming. It refers to the honey chamber’s size for Dadant 6-frame hives. It is twice the volume of a size "Mini +". (...)
The nucleus mating "Mini plus"
In the past, we were using some wooden MiniPlus for the production of queens during the season. The size was sufficient to overwinter some queens (...)
The nucleus mating "Kielers"
We essentially produce our mated queens in Kielers. Starting up of the Kielers:
The Kielers are put into service from mid-April (blossoms of the (...)
