New Bees for 2020

I have 1 hive of bees that did well over winter and are still surviving.  They were "saskatraz" breed, supposedly...bees are notoriously and necessarily promiscuous. 

I tried to order caucasian breed bees, but that got nixed even before the quarantine and travel discouragement, so I went for a local bee source.

Waller Apiary out  of Clarkston, Washington.

The order process SEEMED fine but I did have to follow up on my own initiative to find out when and where I could pick up the bees. 

Today was the day and Clarkston, Washington, was the location.  I combined the trip with a social distance visit to friends in Lewiston (adjacent to Clarkston), a pick up of an order at the hardware store in Moscow, Idaho (and grabbed 2 bags of cheap hinges and one of cotter pins...both things on my list), a bit of gas for the subaru and a pre-planned treat of iced cold brew coffee.

Now to the bee report.
The bees were advertised as 5 frames, a "nuc" in the bee biz lingo which seems to be short for 'nucleus hive', full of honey and brood from a fresh 2020 queen who has been through 1 full brood cycle.

Uh..."full" would not be my term. 
There is precious little honey.  Maybe 1/2 frame total if I put it all together, more likely 1/4 frame but I want to estimate generously. 

ZERO capped worker brood, about 2 dozen capped drone cells (drones are the dudes and only there to mate with some other hive's new queen, they are not what you want to see),  NO eggs, no larvae.

I could not spot a queen and she should have had a big blue dot on her back and been double the size of the other bees.  Hmmm...

There ARE plenty of bees in there so that's good.

Being me, and being old, I sent these pictures and the above info about the lack of eggs, brood and honey to the seller   Beekeeping is a crap shoot, but taking 150$ for something that might croak in a month is not cool. 
I'll give it a week.  I  fed them heavily and will keep up with sugar syrup.  There is plenty of pollen around for their protein source.  If there are no eggs by next Saturday, it will mean the hive is queenless.

There ARE signs that they have a queen.  Those are:
1) they are calm
2) they are organized not randomly running around or flying willy nilly while the frames were moved from the "nuc" box to the real hive box in my beeyard


Only time will tell.