5 Frame Nucleus supplied with a family of Buckfast bees headed by a newly open mated, unclipped & marked 2025 (Blue) Buckfast queen to begin supply May 2025* onward (Weather Permitting*).

An ideal way to start beekeeping is to purchase a Nuc and with our docile bees it is perfect for beginners whilst still maintaining required traits for production, disease resistance and low swarming tendencies.

Your Nuc will be supplied to you with brood at all stages (capped brood, larvae, and eggs) and a sufficient amount of stores**. All of our nucs are made early in the season with the queen supplied allowing them to build up themselves. These are NOT thrown together last minute with a caged queen like many other suppliers.

All our breeding hives are treated for varroa routinely with approved VMD medication of which is recorded and kept for 5 years under VMR 2011SI2159, we are also fully DASH accredited suppliers so you can rest assured your bees will be in prime condition on collection.

Our nucs are supplied on British Standard DN4 National frames (Hoffman spacing 432mm x 356mm) which are suitable for a National Hive & WBC, inside our own bespoke free correx travel box.

Please note these will fit inside of a 14x12 hive but you will have to slowly migrate to your larger frame size. Unfortunately it is not commercially viable for us to produce on several different frame sizes. You can use these in a Langstroth hive (e.g. Flow Hive) by using cable ties to secure a national frame to the top and side bars of a standard Langstroth frame with the bottom bars removed but entirely at your own risk, see Flow Forum guide here. We do have a limited amount of Langstroth Nucs available in April here.

Please select the most appropriate date for yourself when placing your order. Please be aware this date cannot be changed in our system once the order is placed.

Once your order has been placed you will receive a confirmation email of your order and payment. Only when your deposit is received your order is secured. Our first point of contact will be via email so please be sure to enter a valid email address so we can invite you to book into our collection system. If we do not receive a response via email your Nuc will be offered to the next customer in the queue - unfortunately we just do not have the resources to chase customers consistently. We will contact you to make arrangements when we know your bees are ready and aim to supply during your selected allocation week but as we are unable to control the weather allowance of +/- 1-2 weeks must be accounted for as a contingency.

COLLECTIONS - Due to the time constraints we are under in the spring we can only offer collections on Saturdays between 8:00-13:00 (unless explicitly agreed before hand), we specifically dedicate Saturday to collections due to the amount of logistics behind the scenes required for rounding up nucs early AM. We are able to defer your collection to the following 2 weeks unless you are at the end of the order list (generally July). We are unable to delay collections further than this because they will require additional management to prevent swarming. Any additional delays will be charged a hive management fee of £20 + VAT per week.

*All quoted dates are provisional based on conditions and an allowance of +/- 1-2 weeks must be accounted for. We cannot control the weather so please bear that in mind when placing your order. Any updates can be seen on our News & Updates section.

** Please note - depending on the time of year stores may vary, e.g. during April / May there is a strong flow of oil seed rape so a larger amount of honey could be expected. Nucs will initially benefit from feeding to establish into a stronger colony when moved into a full size box as demonstrated in our installation video.

Queens used in our nucs are imported from Europe from reputable breeders.