How To Install A Six Frame Nucleus Colony of Bees Into a Poly Hive

So next up, I'm gonna get the 6-frame nuc and we're gonna install it into this Abelo Poly hive. They have got a wonderful spot in this apiary. Very, very excited. So whenever you're installing nucs, it is really important to get the bees to orientate to the spot first. This is where most people get it wrong. So this nuc here was placed in this exact spot a week ago. I came in, I put the lid on like that, I opened the entrance, I put some stones on there to stop it blowing off. And then over the course of the last week, the bees have been going out, they've been coming back in, they've been orientating, which means doing small little loops out and then bigger loops and basically working out where they are. And they know now that they live on top of this beehive stand here. Now watch this. If I pick up this nuc, try not to knock anything over, and put it over here for a second, the bees don't think, oh, the nuc's over there now, so we're going to go over there. They say, well, hang on, what's going on here? We were, we were literally here a minute ago. And all the bees are just coming in and thinking, This is the spot. Now this is the 3-foot or 3-mile rule in action, which means when the bees are flying, you can't move that beehive anything more than 3 feet like I've just done there without messing everything up. If you wanted to move them, you'd have to close them all in, move them 3 miles away, and then everything is good. But as I said, this is perfect for what we want to do. I'm going to take this Abello polyhive here and just place it into the position, and then we're going to transfer everything over. Okay, so I've got the crown board in position there. If you want to set it up for feeding, what you would do here is take that central one out and place the feeder there inside an eke or a super. But it's such a nice day today, I'm not going to bother doing it. And I know there's going to be tons of stores. So we'll take the crown board off. And then in here, I've just got, I've got a frame of stores that I know is a good clean frame. I've got a frame of foundation there, another frame of foundation. You can use drawn comb, you can use foundation. I would say foundation's probably better for beginner beekeepers. Drawn comb carries disease risk, but it can give your bees a really nice boost. But what it does as well is it accelerates the swarming season. It brings everything closer together. It makes it more difficult for you as a beekeeper. So if you have a choice as a beginner beekeeper, I would go for foundation. Get the feeders on as well. But this one here is going to be super, super simple. I basically got a 6-frame slot in here. All the bees know where it is. All I've got to do now is take the frames out of the nuc, transfer them over, see if there's eggs, see if there's queen. Fingers crossed, no queen cells. That's what we're going to do now. So if you've ordered your nuc from Black Mountain Honey, it will come with screws in like this. So I've got my smoker lit, and I know what a lot of people would do here is they'd be like puffing in like that because beekeepers use smokers and that's what you need to do. But really all you need to do is put your smoker over there and use it if there's an emergency, because what we want to do here is find the queen. And puffing bees like that, all that happens is it panics them a little bit. It does calm them down, but it makes them run, it makes them move, it makes queens go and hide and do silly things. So if you're looking into a colony, try not to find the queen. Don't smoke them, especially if you get nice calm bees as well. But let's crack it open and see if we can find her. So always look underneath first. She will have a big blue spot on her back somewhere. The risk here is this: the queen is somewhere in here. If you pull out the frames and they're not drawn correctly and you pull and smush that queen in between the 2 faces of the frame as you pull it out. It's called rolling the queen. Nice way of saying that you've killed her, you squished her. So just take that into account. Look into your hive like that and think, well, where's going to be the easiest frame to get out? I always think anything that's got any comb like that is probably not a good option. Equally, I'm not keen of taking the ones that are right next close to the wall. I like to go a little bit further in. So I'm going to go for this second one here because there's not a huge amount of comb near it. I've got a little bit of space, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to compress the rest of the frames to give me some space to get that first one out. It's only the first one that's difficult. Super slowly. Okay, that's not good to take out, so I need to do an adjustment. You see how I took the time on that though? I realized that as I was pulling it out, it wasn't coming straight out. So let me go and try another frame. Let me see if I can get this one This out. Okay, so you're going to go for the one second frame. out next to it. Okay, that's a better frame to get out. So I feel no resistance at all, all the way up like that, super gentle. And there we go, the frame is out. So first thing I'm looking for here is eggs, and we have eggs, which is fantastic. Eggs means the queen is in there. I take the first frame, I've checked, I can't see that the queen is on there, and I'm just going to place that into the hive there. Don't worry too much about that frame. What we're going to do now is we're going to find the queen. We're not going to transfer over any more frames. I'm just making some space in there so I don't kill her. I'm going to take a frame out, look for the queen, see if I can find her. If I can't, I put it back in here and I just go through all of the 5 frames until hopefully I find her. I'll tell you what to do if you can't find her, but let's assume for the time being that we are going to be able to find this queen. So beautiful frame of brood there. You can see not only on the top was this colony here struggling for space, but they're doing burr comb at the bottom. That is in fact drone comb at the bottom, shows a really nice big strong advanced colony as well. Can't see the queen on that one, so I'm going to place it back into the nuc. Look at all that clustering at the bottom as well, see the extra bees there, Zane? The comb being drawn down. This here, if you're seeing this, you're probably a few days past optimum for hiving up, but this is, this is great, this is going to work really, really well, but you could have done it a few days before. So that's the first pass and I've not found the queen yet. Brood in all stages on every single frame, which is really good. But don't panic at this point. All I do is I put that frame back in and I just work back through all of the frames one more time. All you want to do if you can't find the queen is take out every single frame, place them into the new hive in exactly the same order that they're in the nuc over there. So as I'm transferring them over, I'm having a look again, trying not to drop anything. We're just doing a little final check. Very important to put them in the same order that they were in inside the other hive. And also what you might find is you might have little issues like this where the, the bit of comb is stopping the frame going in properly. So if that's the case, this is what you need to do. Get the frame like that, get it down, shake all the bees off, and then come along here, take your hive tool, And just tidy up the frame like that. A lot easier doing that without having to do it into a nice neat bucket for camera, but there you go. You can see I've taken the bottom off there and that can go in there now. Very important doing that, don't just chuck it on the floor, don't let the bees rob it out, don't smash it in. You need to take your time and you need to make it all fit well. So next frame, almost certainly going to be the same issue here, I think. So let's shake these ones in. Clean off the wax. So no sign of the queen there, but really good shot of eggs, because this is the most important bit. It's not about seeing the queen, it's about being able to see the eggs at the bottom of these cells here. So you see we've got eggs all the way along there, which means that the queen is somewhere here. And then final frame. So a good amount of stores on that frame there, so very happy. So you can see how the final frame can give you this same issue when it comes to squishing, but the 11-frame Abello is actually pretty good. You get an extra 5mm gap, so you can see how that frame fits in there nicely. Really important thing to do though, push everything up together like that. These little spacers should be touching, gives you the correct bee space. So all of the frames are now in here, but I've still got loads of bees left in the nuc and I don't know where the queen is. Now I'm not suggesting that you try and find the queen anymore. All we're going to do is just make sure that every single bee inside the nuc is in here and the nuc is empty and all of the other boxes are empty. We make the safe assumption that the queen is somewhere in there because we've seen eggs, but I'm going to take a little quick peek inside the nuc, see if we can find her, see if she's wandering around on the walls. So you can see on this nuc here where they've just drawn a little bit of comb on the wall as well, and it is the kind of space that you would a queen. A queen would go and try and find her way in there. She should have a white spot on her back. And there we go, it's not a white spot, it's a blue spot. I have found the queen. She is there, look, Zane. So I found the queen, I put her on there now. She'll just work her way down somewhere, she'll be quite happy. You got her, Zane? Yeah. Yeah, she'll just find a nice little way down. She'll be sensing all of that open brood, all of the pheromones going through. The bees are very, very happy to see her again. And you can see she's not timid at all. She's just working out where to go next. So I'm glad we found the queen there. Ideally, you want to see the queen, and this colony here is set up perfectly now. All of the frames are in. We've got a little bit of stores in there. We've got some foundation. Probably only a week away before we come and put a queen excluder on here, and I'm going to run this nuc here as a My First Nuc series throughout the whole season. So this should be really, really good fun. So that is it. We are fully installed into our new Abelo Poly National hive. These bees really couldn't be in a much better apiary. We're gonna follow this one here week in, week out throughout the whole 2026 season. If you are interested in seeing that, definitely hit the subscribe button.