Introduction. A project was undertaken to study the nutrient cycling from Musa mother plants to daughter suckers based on the physiological stages of the mother plant. It also reports on the dependency or competition at critical stages of flowering and fruiting and the combinations of different densities and sucker retention at different physiological stages of the mother plant. Materials and methods. A combination of three spacings and five sucker retention phases formed 15 treatments. 32P was given through injection into the mother plant pseudostem. The experiment was carried out over two years, the first being a rain-fed crop and the second being under irrigated conditions. Results. Differential aspects of nutrient cycling were observed between rain-fed and irrigated crops with regard to spacing. In the case of sucker retention phases, in the first year, it was retention at fruit maturity, shooting and flower bud differentiation stages which showed higher radioactivity recovery whereas, in the second year, it was the early phases of retention which showed significantly higher recovery. In the case of interaction effects, in the first year, the highest recovery was found in various combinations of spacing with the stages of bud initiation and shooting and, in the second year, the maximum recovery observed was in the combination of the closest spacing with the stage of flower bud initiation. In both years, recovery was observed in the border row plants. Conclusion. The study confirmed that activity extruded out from the treated plant and was absorbed by the border plants, revealing that nutrient sharing takes place in banana. This result opens up another concept that banana recommendation should not only be at an individual plant level but at block or plot level also. Hastening and improving the efficiency of nutrient cycling to the sucker is suggested as a future line of investigation.