Today I went to check on 2 new nucs (3-4 days old) and see if they had released and accepted their new queens. They had, but that was the end of the good news. The populations were very sparse, and there was a lot of recently uncapped and obviously chilled brood. With very little time I moved a strong split from 6 weeks ago and stuck the 2 nucs side by side into it's location. Part of me says I am just wasting resources at this point, the other half says give them a chance.
A bit of backstory:
4 days ago I pulled 4 frames mostly capped brood, 2 frames of pollen and 2 of honey from several hives (all deeps). Shook them clean and then placed in an empty box over an excluder on a strong hive. Next morning they were completely covered, pulled them and placed in 2-5 frame nucs with an empty frame each, at the end of the day I added the caged queens. All of this in same yard.
I was a bit worried from the start, as I wanted more open brood in the mix. And I found that day that the hive I used to repopulate the frames had very little open brood itself, so I thought..."maybe more older bees fewer nurse bees?"
At this point I assume that was the case, and the capped brood wouldn't hold them and they mostly went back to the donor hive. What I found today was they faces of the brood frames that were against each other look OK, the faces against the pollen/honey look awful. So I believe they are a total loss but hope that I still have 1 frame worth of bees emerging soon.
What other mistakes did I make?
Can A weak hive clean up that much mess while trying to get going?
Is it worth trying to help them any more than I have at this point or have I reached the "wait and see" stage?
I'm not sure if it would help or hurt but I had a weak colony that was struggling and I ended up taking 3 frames full of brood and bees from a thriving colony and put them in with the weak one. The weak colony had a lot of cold brood and in no time the extra bees were hauling out the dead larvae and cleaning up the comb and seem to be doing great in their new home.
It is possible the queen in question may have not been mated well and won't be laying the best brood. But by taking some brood from a strong colony they may create queen cells to bring in a new queen that may knock the socks off the competition.
I do a lot of splits and it's surprising how few bees it
takes to establish a NUC. I use mostly capped brood
and one frame of stores. Only a handfull of bees are
necessary to seervice the queen and if you add a mated
queen, she comes out laying. Just do more inspections
and keep adding frames if there are empty frames and the
queen is not keeping up. Soon she will be and the capped
brood hatching in the NUC are much more loyal to the colony.