1) Congratulations, you’ve just purchased a quality nucleus colony with a newly-mated queen from selected stock!
2 Your Nuc has a single new Queen who is the mother to all the egg Lava and sealed brood and young bees she will be marked and running free you will have seen this on the inspection we did when you collected your bees.
3) When you get your nuc home you need to transfer your 5 or 6 frames to a full size hive that you will have already positioned in your Apiary. Install the nuc in the center of a brood box with additional frames to fill the box. You will then need to give your bees a Feed them 1:1 sugar syrup until all the frames in the box are fully drawn. Feeding sugar syrup to the small colony frees the bees from the need to forage for nectar, and they can use their efforts instead to collect pollen, rear brood, produce beeswax, and draw out comb. You should have bought one when buying your Full size hive and spare frames ( If you did not please ask for advice as they have to be feed to expand and survive)
4) Other than feeding you should not disturb the hive for a few days and let them settle in to there new home and surroundings. Inspect the colony after a week. Use little smoke and minimal disturbance. If all’s well, the bees should have started drawing out fresh comb, there should be brood of all ages, including white larvae and eggs. Note that eggs are very difficult for the beginner to see, especially against new comb. The presence of any eggs, or young larvae in royal jelly, means that you have a queen, and all’s well—you need not actually see the queen! But its always best if you do.
5) You may check the colony weekly (but be aware that smoke and chilling disrupt a colony for at least a day). This is your chance to watch a colony grow! Be aware, though, that clumsy handling by beginners can sometimes results in queen loss and also bee keepers with years of experience it happens to the best on a bad day, so it’s a tradeoff between observing the bees, and the chance of killing the queen—you make the decision. As the population grows, and the colony can cover more frames, the bees will draw combs of foundation from the center out, and the queen will start laying in those combs.
6) In general, place the combs back into the same arrangement that the bees had. Always keep brood (and frames of eggs) together, honey to the outside, and pollen at the edge of the brood nest.
a) Exception: It’s hard for the bees to draw out the outermost combs. Once the bees draw out the inner side of the second combs in, reverse those combs, and move them to the outside sometimes they will never draw out the comb on the two outside most frames but if you are using a poly hive they will use all the frame (only if they contain no eggs–see illustration).
7) Feed continuously, but not to the extent that the queen is unable to expand the brood nest due to excess stored syrup and nectar. If the bees store syrup in the center of the brood area (see illustration), cut back feeding dependent on time of year.
Now you are well on your way to building up your colony of bees you need to lean as much as you can read as many books as you can get hopefully you have already been on a beginners beekeeping course or plan to go very soon. You can also give me a call anytime for advice and help
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