There were tons of bees in the nuc, since I did the move around 6:30PM when most of the foragers had returned. I should have hived the nuc a couple of weeks ago - there were enough bees there to make a full deep I'm sure!
I had 5 deep frames and 5 medium frames to move - in retrospect I should have made that yellow mini-super a deep size instead of a medium. So I put the 5 deep frames with 5 new deep foundation frames, and the same with the 5 mediums.
I noticed something interesting as I was transferring the medium frames - along the bottom were 2 chewed out queen swarm cells! The nuc had definitely not swarmed, so I don't know if there was a virgin queen running around in the nuc or not. I was told that if swarm cells are created, as soon as they are capped the current queen leaves in a swarm. I didn't see the marked queen, but I wasn't looking too closely during the hiving.
So here's a picture of the new Pink hive!
I set the old nuc in front of the hive to let the bees find their way to the new home. There were lots of bees flying around, so hopefully they will all find somewhere to go.
I also added a pollen patty and some sugar water jars for feeding. The blue stripe is a 1 1/2" shim because the jars are a little too tall for the medium super which surrounds the jars.
I also took the super off of the Brown hive and added jars of sugar water. The Bee Inspector said that hive was seriously in need of food. The honey super was absolutely empty anyway.
It was interesting to see about 30-40 bees around the old nuc site, very confused because their home is gone:
I'll give the hive a week or so before I do a full inspection to see what I have in the way of queens.
Current hive count: 2 full hives in Sutton, and in my backyard 3 full hives and 1 nuc.
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