I had 4 hives in southlake; 1 purchased nuc, 1 purchased package, and 2 caught swarms (probably not feral, since a neighbor 2 doors down had hives he didn’t manage much). I recently rented the house and went to georgia for two weeks, so I moved the hives to a friends property in wills point. I’m trying to keep a hands-off approach as much as possible. The nuc is currently a double deep, but they weren’t using the top deep more than the frames I pyramided into it the last time I checked. One of the swarms has a double medium (or a deep and medium, I can’t remember) and also hadn’t been utilizing the top box much. The other swarm is still in a single deep, and didn’t seem ready for a box at the last check. The package is really what I’m worried about. It was weak from the start because it got invaded by robbers before it even got out of the package (I put it in a hive with old comb with honey and tried the more gentle, ‘just set the package in the box’ method, and didn’t realize that a swarm had moved into the nearby bait hive the very same day). So before I moved them to wills point, I consolidated that hive down to a nuc. I was just going to leave all of the bees as they are; they are in in nice pasture, and such, and my intervention normally seems to do more harm than good. But I forgot about the nuc. Even if the single box hive can survive, I doubt the nuc can store enough food for winter.
So, I’m looking for options. If I build another nuc box and keep syrup on the hive, is it too late for them to build comb and get stores? What if I build a couple of double-nuc boxes with a queen screen and newspaper separater, split the other single into two nucs, and put the two hives together. Will I just end up killing both at that point? Of should I just bring the nuc into a garage or shed or something and feed it all winter long?