June 11 came before we knew it, and I went out to Dripping Springs to pick up my bees! The bees came as a "nuc" oh hive nucleus. A normal hive is either 8 or 10 frames of bees in a wooden box. A nuc is 4 frames in a cardboard box. The other way to buy bees is as "package bees," which is a shoebox-sized box of bees and a queen. The nuc gives you more bees plus four frames of fully drawn comb that is filled with brood. It's a huge jump-start for a new colony compared to package bees, but you pay for it; a nuc costs about double what you pay for package bees.

Out in the yard with the hive box, the nuc, my smoker

Installing the nuc into the hive is pretty easy; you just smoke the nuc entrance a little, open the lid, smoke the frames a little, and then move the frames from the nuc box to the main hive box. The whole process takes about 5 minutes.

Smoking the nuc before opening the box 

The nuc is open and ready to move into the hive box.

A little more smoke to calm the bees.

I have pulled the first frame of the nuc and
am ready to move it into the hive box.

My first look at a frame of bees!

One more look before loading the bees into the hive box.

Three frames are in the hive box, and I am getting ready to
load the final frame.

The frames from the nuc are full of comb, but it's not honeycomb -- it's brood comb! Brood comb is where the queen lays her eggs. More on that another time.

Bees! This is what a nuc frame looks like!

The last thing to do after moving all the frames is to install the queen. Many nucs come with a queen loose in the box; these are nucs where the nuc has been grown as a nuc from day 1. Some nucs have a queen in a "queen cage," which indicates that this queen did not "grow up" inside the nuc. That also means that the eggs, larvae and adult bees in the nuc were not laid by her.

Our queen is in this little plastic box!

So what? Well, if the bees in the nuc are not "her bees," then you have to go through a process of adjusting the colony to their new queen. If you just dump a new queen into a colony, the bees may decide she is an invader queen and kill her.

The point of the queen cage is to keep the new queen in close proximity to the rest of the colony so her pheromones can take over the colony's bees. That takes 3-4 days...but you have to keep her alive during that time, so you have to protect her from the rest of the colony. The queen cage does just that: it has lots of air flow through it so her pheromones can get out, but the holes are too small for the bees to get in there and kill the queen. There is also a built-in time-release escape hatch, in the form of a candy plug. The queen eats the candy from the inside, the worker bees eat from the outside, and when they meet in the middle (4-5 days later), the queen is loose. By that time, her pheromones rule the hive, and the workers will all accept her as the new queen.

That's it for this post. Next up: our first hive inspection!