Heh. I just checked the timing. The original colony mission was sent out after the Commonwealth destroyed the Terran Union Jump Cruiser.
So you have a colony sent out where somebody might have at least heard rumors of hostile aliens in the area, and then you have 6 odd years with no communications.
This is a colony with no industry and no hope of building a Trans-Newtonian industry. How does it cope?
Once upon a time, it was the hope of the Commonwealth, the future site of offworld industry, perhaps drawing in minerals from Ephesos, Halicarnassus and Pergamon. But none of them were ever surveyed for minerals or even warp points.
Now Herakleia is condemned to be a small agricultural colony. Thebes and Platea will inevitably draw the industry and mining.
So who goes on these colony expeditions? There have to be some who want to claim vast tracks of land that they later sell or rent out once the real estate prices climb. With 60,000 people on a planet, for 6 years, they have time to find some of the pretty spots. Some might even _like_ the idea of having a whole planet to themselves.
So how do they deal with the possibility that an alien threat has at the very least forced the Commonwealth to write off their area of space? One option is to hide. To control all emissions so that no passing alien spaceship would realize that there is a colony. There will probably be factions which are considerably more paranoid, and would be reluctant to respond to a Commonwealth broadcast before checking out the codes.
There would be others who would take the pragmatic attitude that if the aliens could defeat 5 billion humans, 60,000 would have no chance, and their best odds on survival would be to surrender at once.
Aside: A problem that I have with the Battlestar Galactica series is that the Cylons who defeated 12 populated worlds, what, 50+ billion, are troubled by the expenses of fighting an insurgency of less than 50,000. In terms of random distribution, if you had 8? Cylons in the fleet, out of 60,000? to start, discounting a few that were already infiltrating the fleet you still have humanoid Cylons amounting to 1 in 10,000 of the original population. So how many humanoid Cylons would there have to be for there to be that many in the refugee fleet? In the millions. Heck, they could defeat the insurgency simply by giving every human his own butler and maid and/or sex toy.
If the Cylons wanted good relations, they could have shipped in food, luxury items, etc... from the colonies. Make the humans lives so easy that they don't have to lift a finger and the humans would never see the _need_ to revolt.
How the colony reacts to being contacted depends on how the Commonwealth contacts them. If they are basically told that they are on their own and won't receive any more colonists, supplies or industries, it will probably hurt morale. But what would be the point?
As it happens, Astrography provides an option. Herakleia A-III is pretty much right on the route from Corinth to the other warp points. That means that survey expeditions and mining operations beyond Herakleia would find it convenient to communicate or even briefly stop over at the colony. It could even become a forward supply base. Mostly as a matter of providing the colony a reason to be, rather than an actual economic advantage.
By renewing survey efforts beyond Herakleia, the colony is assured continued contact with the Commonwealth for at least a little while.
