First nuc I installed hadn't touched the 1:1 for the first 3 days, it has been fine and sunny with temps around 30c (85F) yesterday was overcast and drizzle but still warm, they decided to hook in and the feeder was almost empty when I checked.
Will open the hive tomorrow and see how they are going and what they have been up to.
Went to to pick up 2 more nucs today, didn't get exactly what I was expecting.
Seller had decided to reduce his number of hives, had 2 x 10 frame hives with single deep brood boxes and full deep supers on them.
Was running queen excluders so we knew the queens were in the bottom boxes, removed the supers, located and marked the queens and transferred the frames they were on to my 8 frame boxes.
Instead of nucs I got 6 frames of brood a full frame of honey and another with honey and pollen installed in my boxes. We shook the bees off the extra frames into my boxes so plenty of bees as well.
One of them should really explode with nearly 3 full frames of capped brood. I will give them a week to settle in before throwing another box on.
Wasn't really ideal conditions to be handling bees, warm, with scattered cloud but blowing a gale, we walked to the hives to see what sort of mood they were in before opening them and they let us know. I got hit between the eyes without so much as a courtesy head butt before hand so we suited up before commencing work. First time Ive been stung in about 5 years and it was surprisingly mild, actual pain from the sting I would only rate as about 20% of the bull ant bites Ive had in the past few weeks. Virtually no swelling in fact had to point out to my wife where I had been stung when I got home.