How To Transfer A Nuc Into A Beehive - A Simple Guide For A Smooth And Successful Colony Move

In this video here, I'm gonna show you how to get your first nucleus of bees into their final beehive. So I'm halfway through the manipulation here. I'm gonna put everything back together again, and I'm gonna start it from the very beginning, when you first come to take your nuc after the postman delivers it to you and put it in its final position. So the postman's delivered your nuc, you check the ventilated screen, full of live bees inside. You take that nuc and you put it down into the final resting position of where you want your beehive. Unscrew the front of it, open it up, and let the bees fly. Now what you need to do here is you need to let the bees fly for an absolute minimum of 24 hours. These come in a Payne's polystyrene nuc. Sometimes we send them out in other poly nucs as well, but you've got a real good buffer in terms of time here. So if they turn up and it's pouring down with rain and it's like 9 degrees, leave them in the nuc. If it's 20 degrees, beautiful sunshine, give them as an absolute minimum 24 hours to Orientate to this position here. What that means is that the bees are going to come out, they're going to realize they're somewhere new, they're going to orientate to this spot. That's what's important here. They don't care about the box, to this spot here. And as long as it's nice and warm, really warm day, within 24 hours you'll be safe to do the next part of the manipulation. As I said, if it's cold, wait until you get better weather before you move on to the next step. The next step should only be done when it's a minimum of, say, 14 or 15 degrees. Preferably warmer than that, and I would choose to do it between, say, midday to 2 o'clock. Choose the warmest, most settled part of the day for you. Next part of the manipulation is very, very simple. It does confuse some people though. So what you're going to do is you're going to close up your nuc, put it off to one side, and then on the position where you put the nuc and let them orientate, that's where you want to put your beehive. So I'm going to set my beehive up here. First off, going with the floor, then I'm going with a polybrood box, but if you've got a wooden one, that's fine as well. brood box there, and then you're ready to start transferring the bees over. I would suggest taking out the middle 6 frames that you've got in your brood box there, giving you enough space to put the 6 frames from the overwintered nuc inside. These frames here, they're standard DN4 frames. This is what you'll get in the nuc. I've just waxed these ones up here. Obviously, the ones that you're getting will either have stores or brood or bees on them, but we've created a nice void like that in the exact same position of where that nuc is orientated. So this is the setup that I've gone with here. Got 3 frames over there, 3 frames there, a gap for 6 frames in the middle. And what you will notice immediately is that all of the bees are trying to get into that entrance. That spot where they're all clustering up is the exact spot where the hole from the nuc was. They know it really, really well. And all you need to do now is transfer over the bees and then they will continue to go in through that new entrance. So first thing to do when you take the roof off your nuc, You might want to puff in a little bit of smoke, but always check the roof for the queen. Sometimes the queen can just be on the underside of that roof. Just have a little look through, make sure she's not on the underside of the roof. And if she's not on the underside of the roof, you can just go and put that somewhere else. Keep it out of the way for the time being, but do double-check that there's no queen on there. Then you can take a look at your nuc, and they might not all look as strong as this one. This is just one of the ones that is well and truly ready for hiving up. We send them out at various strengths, but they'll all get to this very, very quickly, definitely before the end of April. And all you're going to want to do is take each and every single frame out, starting at one end, working to the other, transferring them over to that new hive box in exactly the same order. Don't worry too much about seeing if you can find the queen at this stage. All you want to make sure is that every single bee from this box, whether it's a worker bee, a drone, or the queen, Ends up in this box over here. If you can guarantee that 100% of the bees from the nuc will end up in this box, you will get them all in there and the queen will be there as well. Obviously, if you find the queen as you're doing it, great, put her somewhere safe. You will get all of the bees in there if you get the queen in there though. So what we're going to do now, we're going to take the frames over one by one. I'll have a little check on them, see if I can find the queen. If not, we'll just transfer them over. When you get your hive tool out, make sure that you don't start breaking away at the lugs. I'll give you a really nice close-up at this point. Try not to squish any bees. Early on in the season though, you don't want to start levering away at the lugs because they are liable to break. You're much better off going in the middle, making sure the propolis seal is completely broken, and then you can just lift them out with your hands. First one's always tricky. Make sure you've got all your PPE on. Should have said that at the start. Proper bee suit, gloves. Get the smoker lit if you want to get the smoker lit as well. The only thing I'd say about the smoker is that it's much more difficult to find the queen if you're puffing them with loads of smoke. She's also much more likely to not stay on a frame if you're puffing them with loads of smoke. If you're comfortable doing it, do it without smoke. Much more likely to see the queen. If not, go easy on the smoke. You don't need to puff them too much. A little bit will calm them down. Again, doing it on a nice warm day as it is today, the bees are flying, means that they're a lot less defensive. Nice introduction to your beekeeping career. So all I'm doing, taking each frame as it comes across. I'll have a little look, see if I can find that queen. That's all it takes, a little look like that. You don't need to Don't let it go wild. And then you gently put that into your new beehive. You can have it the warm way, you can have it the cold way. All that means is the orientation of the frames. At this moment in time, either way is fine. So again, couldn't see the queen on there. I've seen some brood, I've seen some eggs. I'm putting them back in in the same order that I took them out, putting the frames close up against each other, but being really careful not to squish any of them. And you can see I'm really gentle with my movements. I'm not rushed. Try not to be scared because the bees do sense it. They sense the kind of jaggedy movements. If you go in nice and calm like this, the bees should respond well. So again, I've not seen the queen. I'm not worrying about it. I'm just putting it into their new home. And again, I've not seen the queen on that. 4 frames in, got a couple with brood on, still not found the queen. And then at this point, if you feel you're running out of space, if things are getting a little bit tight, take out some more of those excess frames. It's easier to put these in at the end as opposed to trying to jam in your final frame that might have bees or the queen on it. And there we go. Second to last frame. I found my queen. This is exactly what your queen will look like here. So she's marked white and she's not clipped. We don't clip our queens when we send them out because not everyone wants their queens clipped, and it's quite difficult managing the ones that do and the ones that don't. Like I said, do not worry if you cannot find the queen. This is what she'll look like though. If you do find the queen, be ultra protective of her. Make sure you don't squish her. Put her where you know she's going to be safe, and then you can fill all of the frames around her. So this is my frame with the queen on. I'm getting a good positive ID on her. I'm putting her in again. The frames are going in the same order. And there we go. The queen is safely in the hive. You will get every single last bee now from this nuc into the hive because the queen is in there. Don't worry if you don't see her. You just need to make sure that everything's empty in this one, and then you know that she's going to be in that hive. This is my final frame. What I'm going to do is I'm going to put this one up next to it. I know that the queen's on the inside of that frame, so I can safely put this back in again. What I like to do at this point is just to, instead of lifting them up, is just to push everything over as one like that. In case you couldn't see that manipulation properly there, I had a gap in between the darker older frames and the new frames, and I've just shifted everything along so they're all butting up. All of these frames should be touching each other to give you the correct bee space. All that's left to do now is just to put your remaining frames in, and always make sure that the last frame you put in is Butted up right against the wall like that, really going to minimize the chance of squishing that queen. So once you've done that manipulation, almost certainly your nuc box is going to look like this. You're going to have some bees left over. Two options here: if you've already found your queen, you can just go straight on to tapping them all into the box. If you haven't found your queen, take your time looking through to see if you can find the queen in this box here. If you find her. You want to try and coax her to go into the hive, or you can just tap her in. If it was me, I'd just tap them in regardless, and I get every single bee into that beehive. So some beekeepers don't like this. I've had people say you shouldn't tap nucs like that. I like to do it this way. Other people like to use a brush. I think if the queen's in there, the last thing I want to do is start brushing her, potentially kill that queen. Seems a little bit crazy, but all I'm going to do is I'm just going to invert this nuc like this. You might have some feeding sticks pop out. Toss them off to one side. Like I said, invert the nuc like that, and you're just going to give it one solid tap to get rid of all of the bees. Make sure that the nuc is going to hit the front there so you're not squishing any of the bees within that hive. Just one tap. And with a single tap like that, you can see you get every single last bee out of there. Okay, there's one or two that I missed, but believe me, you will get the queens out if you do it that way. That's probably got 99.9% of the bees out. And if the queen does remain after that, she's going to be really, really easy to see. So there you go, that's the transfer successful. Don't throw this away. First thing you want to do with this, block up the floor, get a swarm trap in there, stick it up in a tree, see if you can catch yourself a free swarm. These boxes are incredible for catching swarms. I'll stick a link up at the end of the video for bait hives. You can't get a better bait hive than this. Couple of little mods that you need to do and adjust it and set it up in a separate way. But once you've got bees in your apiary or bees in your garden, if you put up bait hives, you're very, very likely to catch swarms. Put this off to one side and I'll show you how to use it next time. Come back to the roof. We said if the queen is already in the hive, you can just tap them in. If you want to have a look on the roof again, see if you can find the queen, again, go for it. It's not going to hurt anyone. I would just tap them in as they are though. Straightforward, single tap, get all the bees off the roof into the hive. And that's it. That's how you clear the roof off. So that's the colony of bees Fully installed into their new home, you're almost certainly gonna see this behavior at the front. That's bees fanning their Nazanoff gland to tell all of those flying bees to come back. This is how you get into your new home. And by the time it gets dark, every single bee will be in there, no problem. The next thing you need to do with these bees is you need to get them set up for feeding. Now, there's gonna be so many different ways of doing this. You're either gonna put a crown board on and then you're gonna put like a rapid feeder on, or my recommendation is to get yourself a poly Ashforth feeder. Makes feeding so much easier and gives the bees really good insulation above the cluster. So this is a polyashforth feeder. If you've not seen one before, highly recommended. This is a Suenti one. I'd suggest getting the Abello one. The Abello one really is the best one you can get in the UK. Regardless of what feeding system you use, soon as you get your bees into your new hive and they've got foundation to draw, start feeding them one-to-one sugar syrup. I'm going to do it in a polyashforth feeder. Do it any which way you like, but you need to feed them. And then keep on feeding them until they've covered at least 80% of the frames in your brood box. That might be 8 frames, that might be 9 frames. The most important bit of advice here is to stop before they start drawing out those final 2 frames on the outer edges. You do not want to overfeed them, especially as you move into April. Very, very high chance that they will swarm if you overfeed them. If you want a rough figure, I'd go for between, say, 2 and 4 litres of sugar syrup as an absolute maximum. But you just need to wait until they start drawing out that foundation, until they've Fill 80 to 90% of those frames, and at that point you can put your queen excluder on, put your super on, and then you're into your weekly regular inspections to make sure the bees don't swarm. For me, I'm going to put my polyash forth feeder on, give them a couple of litres of 1:1 sugar syrup, and that is the manipulation complete. I hope you enjoyed that video. I hope you found it useful. If you bought bees from us this year, thanks so much for supporting us as a company. Hopefully these videos will help you out as you go through the season. I said before I'd link you off to the bait hive video. Check out this video here, which shows you the best way to use your used Payne's Poly Nuc to give you the best chance of catching a swarm in the season.