Today the EMBA club-ordered nucs were available for pickup, which was exciting because we purchased two to increase the apiary at my dad's house.

We arrived at 6:15am, first in line, watching as the volunteers placed screens in the nuc entrances and setting up the check-in table.


The nucs arrived from their long trip on several pallets on a trailer, covered by a screen mesh to protect the bees while in transit.



Once at home, we moved the stack of prepared equipment into place on their stands.



Transferring the frames from each of the nucs to their new homes was fairly easy. We moved the 5 frames from each nuc and added 5 more frames of new foundation.



We found the queen in the first nuc, she was very large and easy to spot. The second nuc wasn't as easy as there were less bees, and the queen (we think she was the queen) was not much larger than her workers.

We didn't want to disrupt them too much, so we put them in their new homes and closed them up.

We'll come back in a week and check on them, and possibly mark the queens if we can find them again.

Below is how we left the apiary. The overwintered "Hive 1" in the right side of the picture, the new nuc or "Hive 2" in the middle hive, and finally the third nuc or "Hive 3" as the left most hive.