5F Wooden Dadant Blatt Nuc

01 · 47 OR 48

There are two Dadants, and a centimetre apart

Two formats share the name: Dadant Blatt, with a 47 cm top bar, standard in France and Italy, and Dadant US, at 48 cm, which is what you normally meet in Spain. A centimetre sounds like nothing until you try to hang the frame: the 48 will not sit on the rebates of a Blatt box. So the word «Dadant» does not decide the purchase — measuring the top bar of the frames you already run does. If you work in US, here you change frames, not boxes.

02 · THE TWO VERSIONS

What sets the frame spacing: the frame itself, or the rack

This is the choice people ask about most and the one nobody explains. Frames have to sit a fixed distance apart, and either the frame or the box can do that. The Hoffman version comes with widened frame sides: they space themselves as one rests against the next, so no rack is needed. The spacer-rack version comes with straight frames and a spacing rack in the box, which fixes the distance and stops the frames shifting in transit. Choose whichever you already run: mixing the two systems is how you end up with frames that will not sit in their own box.

03 · THE TIMBER

22 mm of pine: this is the nuc that does winter

Finger-jointed pine, 22 mm thick, handles damp and warping better than plain solid board and, above all, has enough wall to overwinter in. That is the difference from our HDF Blatt nuc: that one is a season box, thin and cheap, made for collecting swarms and delivering sold nuclei, and we say so on its page. This one you can leave with a colony inside from October to March. It arrives with a single coat of protective oil rather than varnish: if it is going to live outdoors year-round, give it another coat before you put it to work.

04 · BEFORE YOU BUY

Frames are included and wired, but without eyelets: the wire sits straight on the wood, where it bites into the bar and slackens. So make it a routine —re-tension the wire before you fix the sheet, sold separately, and look at it again after the first season—: slack wire buckles the comb on the first move. There is no feeding chamber under the roof, so if you need to feed, the one that goes in without modification is a frame feeder, taking the place of one of the five.