Telling a customer to buy two nucs instead of one isn’t a marketing scheme, it’s a great investment in your beekeeping adventure. To us, it boils down to three things...
1. Keep more bees, learn faster
If you want to learn what can go wrong while keeping bees, having multiple hives teaches you that quickly. What would take you two years with one hive, you essentially learn in a single season.
2. Learn what good or sick looks like
Not all colonies are created equal and some queens will outperform others. You will have an opportunity to see this when you run two colonies. When you only keep one colony, you have nothing to compare it to. Sick vs healthy, aggressive vs docile, productive vs average, the list goes on and on.
3. Redundancy is the key to success
Having a second hive is a redundancy plan incase things go wrong (which they will when you first start out). If you crush the queen, need brood to boost a colony or develop laying workers, lacking resources, all of these can be fixed by having a second colony in reserve. Without a backup, you are seriously out of luck.
We encourage established beekeepers to make up small nucs using our virgin queens during the season. These nucs act as a resource to correct problems in the apiary.
Like we said, redundancy is key for sustainability. So when you go to place an order, consider starting with two nucs. You will thank us later!
Thanks for supporting local beekeeping,
Trevor Bawden
Lloyd St. Bees