How to Install a Nucleus into a Hive for Beginners

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I've taken to wearing a hat to hide my balding head. Hair's growing back all right though. So we're here today, we're putting the nucs that we've got in our new stream apiary, and we're hiving them up. So this video is going to show you how to install a nuc into your hive. Now this is a really kind of simple thing to do, but there's a few key pointers that you kind of need to keep in mind when you're doing this. Every single beginner pretty much needs to watch this video because it's got the tips in there to see you through when you're installing that first nuc, and I'd say 99% of people kind of, they get on board beekeeping by buying a nuc from someone and then installing it in their own hive, and there's a few key tips like I say that I can give you today That will help that go a lot smoother. So I'm going to stick it on hyperlapse, I'm going to show you everything that I do. You can kind of get like a full appreciation of the scale of the kind of, uh, the operation that we've got here. Pretty small, but we're doing about 15 hives here today. Um, but then I'll zoom in and we'll do a kind of detailed step-by-step instruction on how to install a nuc within your colony. So I just wanted to kind of fast forward this to the beginning of the video today. If you enjoy our videos, please, please, please hit the subscribe button. We want to try and get those subscribers as high as we possibly can. It means that we can do more videos and kind of engage with people a little bit better. If you hit the bell on our homepage as well, you'll get a notification for every single video that we do. And like I say, if you can get those numbers up as high as we can go, it'd be much appreciated. So any shares that you can do on your social media, Facebook, Instagram, it's all very, very much appreciated. If you want to drop us a message, we always comment back. If you want to drop us an email or a text as well, we can contact you in that way. So really, really kind of want to boost the engagement on our videos. Let us know what we should be doing and we'll try and kind of cater for everyone. So we're going to crack on with it, we're going to get all the equipment out of the car, we're going to set it up, and we'll do a bit of a hyperlapse, and then we'll come back and we'll go through a detailed step-by-step instruction on how to install a nuc into your hive. Right, so we're pretty much done. I'm going to focus in now on the last one and give you a step-by-step guide. how to install a nuc into a hive. So I thought I'd take this opportunity as well to say I'm proud to announce that Black Mountain Honey is now sponsored by BB Wear. So that's Black Mountain Honey, that's BB Wear. BB Wear are really happy with the videos that we were producing doing the reviews on their suits, so much so that we are now officially sponsored by BB Wear. So any questions, fire away and we can kind of get you in contact with them. It just goes to show again though, I've got these 6-frame nucs here, they're absolutely bursting at the seams with bees. We're doing inspections in the rain, the bees aren't happy, and I am 100% protected by these suits, not taking a single sting. So thanks very much, BB Wear, thanks for the sponsorship, and thanks for producing such fantastic suits. So we're going to zoom in now and I'm going to show you how to install a nuc into a hive. Right, so the first thing you need to realize when you come to install your nuc into your hive here is you need to get the bees To orientate to your site. Yeah, so don't don't think about it as the bees living in a box and you're transferring them from one box to another. The boxes are relevant. Yeah, you are transferring some bees from the beekeeper's apiary to your new spot, your new location. Yeah, so forget about the boxes they come in. Forget about the boxes they're going into. That's the important thing, and you need to make sure that the apiary is at least. 3 miles away from where you're getting it from, otherwise the beekeeper will have loads of bees returning back to him. So let's assume that you've got all of that covered and you turn up at your house on your day with your brand new nuc. How do you go about installing it in your hive? So ignore everything else around me, pretend we're in your back garden and this is where you want to keep your bees, yeah. So you've set up your hive stand there, that's all you need to set up. Yeah, don't set up the hive there, don't do any of that kind of stuff. Just set up, find the spot where you want to keep the bees and set up your hive stand. That's step 1. Step 2, come along with your nuc. So if you bought it in like a poly nuc, great. If you bought it in a Correx nuc, great. It really doesn't matter what you bought them in. If you bought them in a cardboard box, if you've got a swarm, this will still work. You've brought a box of bees and put them in the spot that you want to keep them. Make sure that's the correct spot. You don't really get a second go at this, so not right by the back of your door. Find the correct spot for your bees, as far out of the way as possible, hopefully in an out apiary. If it's in your garden, find a good spot. Then what you want to do is you want to open the box. Yeah, so these are already open, but you would turn that wheel and you would let the bees out, and then you let the bees orientate from that box Yeah, don't open up a box and start transferring them straight away. The first step is find your location. The second step is put your box in the location— doesn't matter what box it is— and let them orientate. Now, if you're in a Polynuc, you can leave them there until they outgrow the Polynuc in terms of space. If they're in a Corex nuc, don't leave them overnight. So you need to do this on the day that you get them. So if you're buying them in a Corex nuc, You want good weather, so you want to get them early in the morning from the beekeeper, and you want good weather forecast for that day, because as soon as you open that box up, the bees are going to come out, they're going to fly around, they're going to orientate to that spot, and that's the important thing. And then you can move on to the next step, and the next step's really, really easy. So the next step is once they've orientated— so I'd give them at least, kind of on a sunny warm day, if they're flying, give them at least 3 or 4 hours As long as you possibly can, really. Um, don't leave it too late that you're going to kind of miss the warm time to do it though. So you kind of want to get them there in the morning, let them orientate for, say, 4 hours as a minimum if they're flying, and then you can move on to the next step. And the next step is take the nuc away again. So it seems a bit crazy, but we're going to take it away again now, and then in the spot that the bees have orientated And don't worry if they start kind of like flying around here. They know this spot. They don't know their box. They don't know the hive. They don't recognize that unless it's within a couple of feet from this spot. What they recognize is this tree. They recognize this branch. They recognize the, the area and the route into this spot because they've orientated to it. So all we do now is you set up your hive in the spot that they've orientated to. So we put one of our floors, one of our underfloor entrances. Loads of people like those. We'll do a video at some point about them showing you how I make them. But you put the entrance there, the floor there, and you make sure you face the entrance in the same direction that the nuc entrance was in. So don't twist it round. You want the bees to continue to fly in, come into there. Then you want to take your box. We're using 14 by 12, so we're moving everything over to 14 by 12 at the moment. And then you want to take out your 6 frames if you've got a 6-frame nuc, or 5 frames if you've got a 5-frame nuc. Then what I like to do is I like all of my frames that are not drawn on one side, and that's just the way I do it. If you're getting all DN4 frames, you can split them like that, put the nuc in the middle. It doesn't really make a massive amount of difference. Yeah, so the way I like to do it is like that. New frames at the front, and then I'm going to install my old— sorry, my nuc frames in the back. So then you can safely get into your nuc and don't worry about the bees flying out. This is what you've done, is you've made sure that when they fly out, they go back home. Yeah, it doesn't matter the box, doesn't matter the shape, they know to come out of here and fly down into there. So that's what we're going to do. If you were to do it another way, yeah, so if you were to set up your hive there and just come down with your nuc and open up the nuc, they're going to go, where are we? We don't know where we are, let's orientate to here, and then you lose a lot of bees. You might lose the queen. That's what you're kind of mitigating by doing it this way. So then all you're going to do is you're going to go through frame by frame and you're going to find that queen and you're going to put the frames in the same order As they are in the nuc into this hive, and you're going to check for the queen. And that's the important thing. I really, really recommend take your time doing it, make sure the queen is in there. You need to make sure the queen is in there. And if you want to have a look for brood at that stage, you can. If you want to have a look for swarm cells as well, you can. Sometimes they swarm in the nucs. Hopefully the person you're buying the nuc from would have checked this for you, but it's good to kind of check and do that, do it with them. So preferably, ask him nicely, your beekeeper might come and do this with you, that's even better, then he can show you the queen. So then you take your nuc, and as you can see, we've got a lovely 6-frame of nuc there, loads of bees, loads of brood, we're going to get them out. So couldn't find the queen. So what you do now if you don't find the queen is look for her in the box first. Yeah, that's the first place you need to go and look for her. There's always going to be bees at the bottom of the box, just have a bit of a quick glance. So thankfully she's not in the box. If she's in the box, it's fine, you can just tap her in. Now we're going to go back through the frames again one by one, and hopefully we'll find her on the second pass. So you do, you do get better at finding queens as you kind of go on with beekeeping. So there she is, you can see the queen, she's just there. As you can see, lovely frame there, lots of pollen, lots of stores. Good frame. So I see her again, I've got a positive ID on her, and she goes back in. And then what you want to do is make sure that the frame spacing is all correct. DM4s make this so much easier. If you can buy them all on DM4s, definitely go for that. So much easier than a mixture or DM1s, in my opinion. But you can roughly gauge it. And then that's it, like, we're nearly done. The big thing here, yeah, is make sure the queen's in there. The queen, she lets off a pheromone and she will call those stray bees back in. You've orientated them to that box and you can see them, they're kind of flying around here a little bit. Um, but we'll cut back to this in 5 minutes and they'll all be back inside. So then you've got loads of bees left on here, you You know that the queen is safely down there. Don't do this if the queen's in here. And you just want to go one good knock, just one, like that. Have a check, you've got the majority of them, and shake the rest in like that. Adjust the frames if necessary, and then normally I would either put a crown board or a queen excluder on top before I put my roof because I'll crush bees. I haven't got them here today, so I'm doing this a little bit backward. But what I do is I put the roof on at ajar like that, and what that will do is that will keep all the bees in there, and then any stragglers have got a few additional entrances. So if they're not too familiar with the new floor that you've put on, they can get in at these entrances around here. And that works really, really well. And then just leave them, give them 2 hours, go away, sit 5 to 10 meters away, have a cup of tea, and watch your bees all reorientate back. You know that the queen is safe and sound in there, everything's good, all those bees will come back in, and that's it. You've transferred it over to your hive, and then you can take your nuc and you can go and catch swarms with it. That's what I do with these. These are excellent for going and catching swarms. So I put some foundationless frames in there, awesome frames with foundation in. I strap it up and I put it in the back of my car with a bee suit, and then when someone calls me for a swarm, I've got something ready to go and catch them in. Really, really good for that. Obviously great for making splits later on in the year. So I always recommend if you can get your nuc with a poly nuc like this or a wooden nuc, really, really good to keep one of these spare because when you come to find you've got queen cells, you're going to need another box anyway, so you might as well get one throughout thrown in as part of the deal. So that's it, that's our video today. We showed you how to install a nuc within your hive. Just to run through the steps again, forget the boxes that they're in, forget the boxes that you've bought. What you've bought is a colony of bees, and you're putting that colony of bees in a position in your garden. Yeah. So you take the nuc that you've bought, you put it on the hive stand, and you let them orientate out of that box. If it's a poly nuc, leave them for a few days. If it's a Correx nuc, 4 hours is an absolute minimum. Make sure it's nice weather. Then you're going to take that nuc off, put your new hive back on, remove 6 frames, and then you're going to go through one by one putting those frames in, in the same order, making sure that you get an ID on that queen. Then you're going to knock all of the XXBs back in, and you're going to put a lid on like that. You'll see them, they're already kind of starting to cluster around the queen like that. They're going to cover that brood and they're going to be good to go. So it's a really, really easy manipulation, but there's, there's a few kind of key mistakes that people can make. So hopefully this video will show you how to not make those mistakes. So we'll keep it short, we'll keep it sweet, and that'll do for today's video. Really, really hope you've enjoyed it. Again, please make sure you subscribe to our channel. Please hit the bell so you're notified of every single video. Thanks again to our sponsors BB Wear, and I'll see you next time.