nucs

They should progress fine without it, but they will progress much faster with it. The more you put into them, the more you will get out of them. Main thing is watch for them to finish the other frames. It may be much quicker than you think. Don't let them run out of room.

 

I split a nuc a few days ago and added a new queen so when i went to check on them they had release the queen and she was walking around and today i went in to see how they were doing and i found that half of my bees were gone but i did see new eggs and plenty of capped brood. Is there a way to boost them up some more i was thinking of maybe taking some spray with some pro health and spray the bees in the nuc and the bees from another hive and let them clean each other off and maybe they will stay with the new queen and help keep the brood warm.

Thomas

 

Hello Thomas,
You could probably take a sheet of newspaper with a few slits and place it on top of the weak hive/nuc. Put an empty box on top. Then shake some nurse bees from another colony on top after smoking the original hive real good and like you said, spray them down with a little sugar syrup. By the time the smoke clears, they clean themselves up and eat through the newspaper, they should be fine.

Are you making splis in the same yard? If so, this will continue to happen. In most splits, you can expect to lose 25 to 50% of the bees as they return to the original colony. Some bees are programmed to return to that spot (field bees) but also think some bees just hone in on the queen's pheromones. I really overcompensate for this when doing splits. I also, as you know, like to swap locations between weak and strong colonies.