"Kieler Kästchen" to "MiniPlus" Hive Adapter Frame

Professional queen bee selective breeders during their main season (April-July) need to create lots of colonies, one for each queen to be raised. However, their available bee mass is limited. So the units they create are very small, using also very small hive boxes. In Germany the _"Kieler Begattungskästchen"_ (Kieler Mating Nuc) are very popular, and some breeders have hundreds of them in use.

At the end of the season - what to do with all the units?  All the left-over high queens? What to do with the "best" ones which were not yet sold?

So the people migrate the units to the next bigger hive box and try to let the colonies build up further in there so they have a chance for successful overwintering. One hive format to do this is the _"MiniPlus"_ hive. Migrating dozens or a hundred mini colonies to new boxes is a lot of work.

Hence this design: it is a frame which can be simply placed on top of a styropor "Kieler Nuc", on top of which the MiniPlus is placed. The mini colony, if well fed, will by itself move upward and into the spacier environment. The beekeeper now has much less work to get the colony thriving and put it through winter.

• If you have access to a big 3D printer, you can print the adapter frame in one piece (plus another small part: the corner guides which prevent the upper box from moving sideways).
• If you have only a small printer (like the Prusa Mini) you can print the frame in 17 smaller pieces (all without supports) and simply plug them together. Optionally, glue them (but make sure you assembled them correctly).

We will soon publish the source code (.scad) of this and other designs on GitHub using a Free and Open Source License. For now the license of the uploaded STL files here is CC-BY-NC-SA.

The STL file *EINZELTEILE.stl contains 8 main parts and 9 smaller parts which are provided in a single STL and can be printed in one go even on smaller printers without any support. 8 of he smaller parts are connectors to plug the main parts together. Optionally you can glue them, but make sure you have the assembly right.

The STL file *GANZ.stl is 282 x 282 mm in size, so cannot print on every printer.

Both STL files print 1 small rectangle part extra which can be easily broken into 4 pieces. These pieces then provide the corner guides when plugged into the main frame which stop the upper box (MiniPLus) moving sideways.