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 


10-frame bee hives 


Production of honey 


Production of pollen 


Divisible hives 


6-frame bee hives 


Maxi-Plus bee hives 


The nucleus mating "Mini plus" 


The nucleus mating "Kielers" 

