There a few ways of acquiring your bees.

1.Get a full colony of bees. Not a good idea if you are just starting off as this will take a lot of management and will be a big learning curve.

2.Catch a swarm. Bees for free or Freebies (free bees), if you will, but you don’t know anything about these bees and their health. This could be a problem.

3.Buy a nucleus. This is a small colony of about 10,000 bees with a mated queen. You usually get about 5 frames filled with eggs, larva, sealed brood, honey and pollen. The bees that come with it are a mixture of older flying bees and younger non flying ones - in other words a miniature colony. This is probably the best option for the beginner. A nucleus can be bought from specialist breeders or from members of your local beekeeping society.

                                             
 

The latter is probably the way to go as you will know where the bees are from and their temperament. What you are looking for as a novice beekeeper are placid, easy to handle bees.

We were going down the route of getting 2 nuclei from Pete, our resident bee expert. He has a very placid strain at one of his apiaries that I have handled on several occasions and had very kindly offered to raise two nuclei for us. Unfortunately only one of the new colonies survived so we ended up with a mixture of one hive of Pete’s bees and one hive from a swarm that I captured with a friend of mine.
                                             
THE BEES ARRIVE

It was around 4pm on Monday 21st when I got a call from a friend of mine called Adrian who lives up the road from me. I was in work about 30 miles away when he rang and informed me that there was a swarm of bees in St Mellons and did I want it for one of my hives? I said to him, “Do bears s**t in the woods?” or, “Yes” for short but I would not be able to get back home for a few hours. I got home around 6:30pm and Adrian picked me up at 7pm and off we went to catch the swarm.
On arrival, at the swarm site, we found a group of people standing around and looking up at a tree that was near some houses. In the tree there was a rugby ball sized swarm of bees all calm and ready to settle in for the night. Little did they know they were going to get a nasty shock and be messed around with. Off we went back to the car and got our space suits on ready for action. A very kind man lent us his step ladders and we were off. We laid a sheet on the ground and I stood under the swarm holding a skep (a wicker basket) ready to catch the swarm, Adrian climbed up the ladder and started to cut the branch the swarm was attached to. Most of the bees landed in the skep and some landed on me, quite a lot actually but these soon started to fly around to look for their friends. We then turned the skep upside down onto the sheet and propped a stone underneath one side to allow the stragglers to find their way in. Within a few minutes bees started to stand by the opening and started to fan their smell out into the air, we stood and watched as one by one the flying stragglers found there way back to the rest of the swarm. After half an hour all but a few bees were in the skep so we pulled the sheet over the top of it and put an elastic band round it to hold the bees in. Into the back of the car it went and we made our way back to my house where I had prepared a hive to accept the little darlings.  
                                             
  Once home the sheet was taken off the skep and placed in front of the hive leading up to the entrance. You see, bees always prefer to walk uphill, so we shook the swarm out onto the sheet and sure enough the bees did what I had read about - they all started to march uphill  
                         
  towards the hive entrance.
                                             
 
                                             
It took about 3 hours for all the bees to finally enter the hive. What a sight it was to watch. Because they do not have many stores of food with them I decided to feed them with sugar syrup which they lapped up.
                                             
 

Our allotment was not ready to take the hives so I decided to go up every night after work until Friday to get everything ready. Luke and Sue came up to help on two evenings which was great because it would have taken me ages to do it all on my own. After a lot of hard work preparing the area, digging post holes, concreting posts in, laying slabs to mount the hives on, putting ground cover down to stop weeds and finally surrounding the 10 foot x 10 foot area with a wall of chicken wire. The wire is put there to make the bees fly up into the sky when they leave the hive instead of flying at a low level. Doing this means that the bees will automatically fly at a high into and out of the hive and not cause any nuisance to our neighbours on the allotment.

Friday night came and at about 8pm Adrian turned up to help me move the hive up to the allotment. The bees had been quite at home in my garden and it was a shame to see them go, but the allotment is a better place for them.

The trusty sheet came out again and the hive was placed onto it and wrapped up then tied together with string. I said to Adrian “Do you think it will be ok? The sheet won't come apart, will it?” He said, “No problem. Don’t worry.” Into the back of the car it went and off to the plot we trotted. Adrian was going out with his family to a party that night so he drove his car to my plot and I took his wife and son in my car so that they could go on from there. When we got to the plot the hive had started to come apart and some of the little devils had started to get out, luckily not many.
                       
 
                                             
We moved the hive to its permanent position, removed the sheet and opened the entrance to the hive. As we did a load of bees came out to greet us and gave us a good telling off for moving them! You can imagine they would be fairly annoyed after swarming on Monday, being flung into a basket, driven several miles, tipped out onto a sheet and being made to walk up hill into a strange hive. Then after only a few days to settle down they were wrapped up again bunged into the back of a car, driven another several miles, squashing a few on the way and finally being placed into their new home. After going through all of that they settled in to their new surroundings very quickly.