Banking queens in a nuc

[RebelRx]

Has anyone ever tried banking queens in a NUC hive?  Let me explain.  I have 20 regular hives w/ 2 deeps and various sizes of supers (medium & shallow and a few deeps for supers on large hives)  I also have 2 nuc hives I started this year not really wanting to expand them. I would like to keep them just to have an extra queen incase one of my regular hives need one over the summer.  My original plan was to to remove a frame every other week from each hive to provide new space for them to work.  Will it set these hives up to swarm or will they be content with the 5 frames with a new one every other week.  More or less an experiment. Has anyone tried this method of "emergency queen" keeping.

[Michael Bush]

I raise queens, but even if I just want to bank a queen to make a good hive queenless for a cell builder or whatever, I use my medium depth two frame mating nucs to bank the queens.  But a real queen bank, to me, means you have several queens in a nuc still in their cages.  I prefer to have then in the two frame nucs, though because they can lay and are ready to go when you want to put them in a real hive.

I have nucs of many sizes:
http://incolor.inetnebr.com/bush/images/AssortedWidths.JPG