Hives not doing well

[APed]

So let me keep this short. In mid-april I bought 2 packages of hives with queens. I put these packages in two 4 foot long TBHs. One hive was doing really great the other hive lost the queen and was dwindling and not building anything. I then ordered two queens. Put one in the queenless hive and made up a new Nuc TBH and borrowed some bees and brood from my big queenright hive.

Fast forward to now, formerly queenless hive is slowly slowly building up comb the numbers don't seem to be increasing much but I sometimes see bees going in which pollen which I never saw for that hive before.

The nuc hive is pretty much over and done with. They still have the queen and a handful of bees. They had some brood growing but now they seem to be letting them die. The hive smells of dead bees. But theh are all healthy in htere and everything looks good. They are definitely not building comb. I just started feeding them sugar water and it disappears so fast I can hardly keep up. I am not sure if the other the bees from my other hives were also joining in on the feast so I gave them syrup but they were not interested. So this has to be all the nuc hive. I just started giving syrup 2 days ago. But I still don't see anything positive going on in the hive. I don't want to take more bees from my big hive because I definitely borrowed enough from them and they don't seem to be building that fast anymore either. They hardly have any honey.

So I have no idea what to do here. Accept what how these bees are and start over next year? One really really odd thing I do notice is that my yard is about an acre and filled with flowers of all sorts, roses, veggie flowers, wildflowers, clover. I NEVER see a honey bee on those flowers. I see a bumblebees and flies on these flowers but never my bees. And I moved the nucleus hive to the center of my yard which is also the center of my vegetable garden and they don't seem to care to fly the 1 foot to get to any of those flowers. Any ideas why this is so? Is there anyway I can tell them to go after those flowers?!?

[beedeetee]

Most years I really don't see many honey bees on flowers around my yard either. I have the hives right in 15 fruit trees, but they all get pollinated by wild bees and mason bees. I see a couple of honey bees per tree sometimes.

Now that I have 10 hives back there, they still don't pollinize my fruit trees but I do see them on flowers now. Mostly though there is a roar of bees all going up, up and away for something better.

[APed]

If that's the case then how could beekeepers ever charge farmers for pollinating orchards and the like??

[beedeetee]

when we (grew up on cherry orchard) rented bees we always wanted them to come in when the orchard was 5-10% in bloom. Since the orchard was so large the bees would find the fruit trees first and just keep pollinating them until they were done.

My hives have already found something that they like before my fruit trees start blooming. By the time what ever they are already visiting is done so are my fruit trees. If I really wanted my bees to pollinate my fruit trees I should move them out until the trees start to open and then bring them back. I would probably have better luck, but I only have 15 trees, not thousands.

I now also raise mason bees which work hard on my fruit trees since they don't fly so far.