It's April 30th and I've picked up both nucs. They were here and ready for me on the 16th; but, I was on my way to a week's vacation in Italy. The nucs are interesting - they are essentially 1/2 of a deep super ... They have 5 full frames in them, a fully functioning (already) laying queen, and bees from eggs, through all larval stages, young bees, nurses, foragers, and guards. It's really a functioning mini-hive. Why I didn't start with this last year I do not know. By using a nuc, the bees are fully functional from day one once I install them into the full hive. They do not need the time to free the queen, let her go off and mate, build comb, allow her to lay eggs, and start the whole life cycle. The added cost? Only $5 per nuc.
So I began by setting the nucs on top of the hive bodies to give them a chance to settle down. There is a piece of screen in the nuc opening that keeps them intact while transporting them in the car. After 15 min or so of letting them sit, the noise or hummmmmm level died down a bit so I decided to begin to pull the screen out. Now, I'm doing this without any protection and I am ok with this ... this year so far. As I gently pulled out a corner of the screen, a few bees came spilling out into the air ... no problem. I waited about 10 more minutes before pulling more of the screen, with again more bees coming out. Finally fully pulling out the screen on hive # 1, and then on #2 ... As I did, this one bee darted fast as a jet at me, and stung me on my right thumb in the area where all the fat is. My first sting since I began keeping bees last year! I looked at the stinger in my thumb, and my first thought was to walk in and show Colin the stinger in my hand when I saw the end was pulsing, pumping it's venom into my thumb! I scraped it out with my other thumb nail and went inside. No problem with the sting - no adverse reaction.
About an hour later I returned fully suited up, using gloves and veil and installed them into both hives. It was good to see so many bees again in one spot. I will say that these bees seem so very much more aggressive than those I had last year. There were thousands flying around me, pinging off the veil. They weren't thrilled with being transferred from the nuc body to the hive body; but, they survived and so did I. I had the carryover frames from last fall that had comb and some capped honey on it, I used those to complete the 10 frames in each hive's deep super, put the inner and top cover on and walked away. No stings through the gloves or the suit.
Lots of activity around the hive, yet by dusk, all had settled in to their new homes.
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